


ah! this grief like cold bells ringing

by loquaciousquark



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Rape Recovery, Rescue, Romance, Sexual Content, Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:27:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27334189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loquaciousquark/pseuds/loquaciousquark
Summary: Six weeks ago, Hawke was taken by slavers and driven north to a Tevinter market. Today she is sold, whether she wills it or not.—A study on how to live again, afterwards.
Relationships: Fenris/Female Hawke
Comments: 61
Kudos: 176





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic for myself. COVID has devastated my mental health in myriad ways, and over the last few months I began craving a particular sort of story to cope with it. A rescue, specifically, a delineated end to all suffering and an exploration of the healing that then follows. A trauma with a clear stop, I mean—in other words, anything but what we're living through right now. 
> 
> I fully acknowledge that this fic is a thinly veiled coping mechanism, but that doesn't mean this story will be for everyone. I have often danced around certain themes in my writing, especially as regards Tevinter's treatment of its slaves, but once I started writing this it quickly became clear that my usual oblique references weren't going to suffice. This piece will deal specifically with **rape, sexual assault, public humiliation, and general violence in the context of slavery** , including threats of sexual violence and violently misogynistic language. The rape itself is (recently) offscreen, but explicit exploration of the aftermath and its recovery, especially sexual recovery, will be a central theme. 
> 
> It helped me to write this, so I am sharing it in hopes that it might be useful to someone else as well. It unintentionally has become something of a spiritual successor to Mute, which I wrote almost ten years ago; for better or worse, Hawke continues to cheerfully bear the trauma I process through her recovery. I hope you find it worth reading.

I would like to give you the silver  
branch, the small white flower, the one  
word that will protect you  
from the grief at the center  
of your dream, from the grief  
at the center. I would like to follow  
you up the long stairway  
again & become  
the boat that would row you back  
carefully, a flame  
in two cupped hands  
to where your body lies  
beside me, and you enter  
it as easily as breathing in

—excerpt from _Variations on the Word Sleep_ , by Margaret Atwood

“Hie there, girl, to the block!” shouts Bortas, gesturing her forward impatiently with the whip handle. Hawke considers headbutting him into the crowd below, but if she embarrasses him so publicly here they won’t stop at beating her senseless this time. She settles for a mutinous glare, as if it will matter, and takes the three halting steps to the raised block beside him.

Eight inches tall at the most, but her ankles are chained so tightly together it might have been a mile. The writhing impotence is nothing new; neither is the abject shame as the crowd laughs at her humiliation. Bortas knocks her knees from behind with the handle of his whip so they buckle forwards, bashing them so hard against the edge of the block she yelps. The crowd laughs again as she crawls forward onto the stage, as she struggles to her feet at last with hands bound tightly at the wrists, then bound again to the heavy brass chain around her waist. A few whistle. She stares above their heads to the middle distance, pretending she is unmoved.

Bortas chuckles behind her, soft, smug. The arrogance is enraging; without her bindings her wrath would set every inch of this slaves’ stand afire at once. The brass collar around her throat lights white-hot even as it siphons away her magic, as if in sympathy, and Bortas laughs again. “Angry little thing,” he murmurs, smiling, and runs his hand possessively down her side and hip to grip the inside of her thigh through her thin white shift. “Don’t worry, my girl. You’ll be through with me soon enough.”

“Don’t tease!” shouts someone from the bright, cheerful crowd, and Hawke clenches her eyes shut. She’d kick him off if she didn’t fear falling; even after six weeks the tight range of her chains occasionally surprises her, and the only thing worse than being sold at some Tevinter auction in the middle of Cytates would be to break her neck needlessly in the process. _Ah, but would it really be worse?_ a soft voice asks. She grits her teeth.

“I bet she bites,” someone else calls, clearly enjoying her fury, and Hawke opens her eyes the narrowest slit. A busy crowd for the Tevinter city, the sunny weather warm but not stifling, the colorful silks and tapestries which line this market street dancing in the gentle winds. Enough prospective purchasers have gathered at this auction that annoyed passersby must elbow their way through the far side of the street. The two bustling branches of the market are spaced well apart on either side; no spice stalls would dare be set close to the stage, nor fruits or meats—not with the rank, powerful odor of unwashed flesh overwhelming all nearby—and even the nearest linen-seller seems irritated at every twist of the breeze in her direction. Occasionally the reek of fish floats by, telling Hawke they are closer to the docks than she’d suspected, but nothing else arises to place her in the city, no other clues to pinpoint which street might lead the most directly to her freedom.

Not that she has much chance of getting at it, she thinks bitterly, as Bortas squeezes her thigh once more. She’s barely warded off despair for six weeks; there’s little left of her courage now behind the helpless rage.

“Come on, Bortas! Put her up!”

Bortas throws back his head in laughter, the long black tail of his hair flying. “Peace, friends!” he calls, and smacks her hard on the ass before striding forward to the stage’s edge. She lurches again—manages not to fall through the spike of agony in her back—bites the inside of her cheek so hard she tastes blood. Somehow—somehow, one day she will break this collar and she will _kill him—_

Eventually the roaring in her ears subsides enough for her to realize he’s more than halfway through her auction plate. Tevene is not her strongest language, but she can pick out most of it: female, thirty or so years of age, unbroken, violent. Killed three on apprehension, killed another while chained along the journey north. “But no one liked him, anyway,” Bortas adds with a wink, and the crowd laughs and jeers. No one believes him, not really; she can see it in their faces. Her best hope. Her _only_ hope, to be bought by someone who will underestimate her. Someone she can charm into releasing the damned noose around her neck, no matter the cost in the charming.

Her jaw creaks. She never should have patrolled the cliffs alone. Even Anders had offered to come, gaunt and worry-worn as he’d been, and she’d shaken her head. He’d had such important work waiting for him at the clinic. Such need of a reprieve. Such…

Six weeks, and her neck burns like fire.

Bortas calls her some word she does not know. The crowd murmurs, intrigued, and he turns back to face her. “Show them,” he commands.

“Shan’t,” she says, with a smile so sharp one of the unbearded men in the front row flinches. “Even if I knew what you wanted.”

Bortas smiles back, close-lipped, and runs one hand across her stomach, up between her breasts, then takes her by the throat, just below the brass collar. His heavy rings are ice-cold through her shift. “You will show them your magic,” he says in soft, accented trade, “or I will chain you to this block and leave you here for them until dawn tomorrow, and then I will sell whatever is left of you for houndsmeat.”

It is a shockingly effective threat, and fear grips her as tight as his hand as he releases her. “And how,” she starts in her broken Tevene, and is perversely pleased her voice doesn’t tremble, “with this collar around my neck, would you like me to do that?”

His hand returns to her neck, but this time it is only to place his thumb on the grooved socket at the front of the collar. He closes his eyes, twists his thumb a quarter turn, and—there. Just a wisp of power, the faintest memory of a memory—nothing she can do _anything_ with except to prove that it exists at all. His threat still rings in her ears.

Hawke pinches a bit of blue soulfire out of the air, even that straining the edges of her ability now, and holds it as best she can in her palm before her. The crowd oohs and aahs, sufficiently impressed, and Bortas steps back, pleased. For the best, perhaps. If they do not know the strength of her magic at full force, her chances might be better to kill whomever buys her here today. So long as Bortas is paid by then, he will not care; he’s grinning at her now, gold-capped teeth gleaming in the clear Tevinter sun.

“How you hate me, my girl,” he says softly, and covers her hand with his own to snuff out the flame. She recoils from his touch, staggers, and straightens again. The man in the front no longer looks so cowed. “She does hate me,” he repeats to the crowd, much louder, and doffs a grand bow. “But I can tell you from experience, my lords and ladies, that she fears death more than the wounding of her pride, and she’ll behave for you with the right incentive.” He makes a lewd gesture, bows again, then grasps the hem of her white shift and yanks it upwards. “You see, she is prepared for you in every way.”

The brass chain around her waist prevents him reaching farther, but the crowd doesn’t particularly care. The leers turn darker, edged in violence; the man at the front meets her eyes and gives a vulgar lick of his lips. She holds his gaze, staring long enough he eventually drops his eyes and looks to his fellow, but nothing can prevent the scarlet flush from flooding her face and chest. Not even the rage is enough here after so long; that shield has gone thin and thready against the weight of utter shame, and Bortas knows it.

“Poor girl,” he says, smiling. “It wouldn’t hurt so much if you’d quit fighting it.”

She hates him. She hates him, she _hates_ him, and he smacks her bare ass once more, just because he can, before finally dropping the shift. She can’t even speak through the hatred, but she’ll be burned alive at the stake before she gives him the satisfaction of her tears.

“Make another the whipping girl for her,” Bortas adds, his voice carrying over the dozens of upturned faces, “and she’ll even sing a song for you while you fuck her.”

They roar at that, slapping their knees and knocking shoulders with their fellows. Robes heavy with gold filigree brush against bright-dyed silk suits; staffs, light and dark, are pounded into the sandy road; one man’s beard, braided heavily with gold beads, glints in the light as he laughs, openmouthed.

Hawke grins so that all her teeth show, wild with fury. The laughter begins to die away; Bortas shakes his head. “What? Cowed, are you, by a Marcher bitch?”

“Try me,” Hawke snarls.

The rest of the levity dims, the nearest two or three stepping discreetly away from her reach, and too late Hawke realizes she should have simpered, should have cried and whined and pleaded until even the weakest man with a deep purse could be swayed. But to give Bortas the satisfaction—to see him pleased by her broken resolve—she can’t. She _can’t._

Bortas smiles again, because even this is a victory for him, and turns at last to the bidding. She will open at twenty solidii. An insulting price; the cost of one night at a decent inn. She knows she is worth more. She checks herself—better to be glad the price is so low—the better to deceive her buyer. No, she is insulted—she is bitterly angry—what is _wrong_ with her, she is the Champion of _Kirkwall_ , not chattel to be proud of her price as she’s _sold—_

She tilts her face up to the sky and closes her eyes. A blue sky today, cloudless, warm. A breeze tosses the ends of her hair playfully, bringing a whiff of salt air untouched by rank sweat and misery. They’d let her keep her hair, one of the few in the sixty-odd slaves she’d travelled with, because they’d liked the look of her with it. Everyone else they’d shaved on acquisition, then shaved again this morning to fend off the lice. She and the other three, two women and a man, had been doused in kerosene to kill the nits. She’d almost reached for fire, then, just to be done with it all, before the brass collar had driven her to her knees with agony. Talmet had beaten her bloody afterwards for the impertinence. Her back still burns where the rod broke her skin.

Funny. If she tries hard enough, she almost can’t make out the words. Forty solidii. Fifty. Fifty-five. Sixty. Sixty leaves fallen from the fig trees that line the streets here, perhaps. Sixty stones scattered along a seabed, worn smooth by a thousand years of waves.

Sixty-five solidii. The price of a good horse with new shoes thrown in.

“Seventy,” says a man to her left, and every nerve ending in her body strikes like a sounding trumpet. Only the barest lingering shred of rage keeps her head tipped back, her eyes shut. She loosens her fingers where they’ve knotted into her chains by force of will alone.

She might be mistaken. She could be, and if she is—

“Eighty,” calls a woman far in the back, with a jade-green veil and a proud red mouth who scorns the crowd’s heckling. “I’ve need of new breeding stock for my incaensor.”

“Eighty-five.”

“Ninety.”

“Ninety-five,” says the voice again, coolly disinterested, and Hawke counts to a slow thirty in her head before allowing herself to look.

Don’t linger. Don’t stay too long. As if he were the same as all the rest, and just as hated—

There.

He’s dressed himself in black, mostly unornamented. A heavy cambric shirt with a high collar and wide sleeves which gather tightly at his wrists; loose black pantaloons tucked into knee-high grey boots. A wide grey sash, knotted and re-knotted so that the tail falls asymmetrically at one hip; a stiff-shouldered sleeveless overcoat, also high-collared, trimmed in black and gold. Black gloves, one hand wrapped comfortably around an expensive, simply-carved staff. A thick, dark scarf even in the Tevinter sun to disguise the markings over his chin. A fashionable mantíla wrapped over hair she knows is white as bone, banded artlessly loose so that the twists and folds of fine grey wool well hide his pointed ears. His green eyes are trained on Bortas, heavy-lidded, as if bored beyond belief.

Then Fenris glances at Hawke, just for an instant, and she must clench her eyes shut against the pain.

Hate him. Hate him as much as you do the rest, or you are both lost.

A hundred and fifteen. A hundred and twenty. The proud woman waves Bortas away, disgusted. The lecher in the front row, the one who’d licked his lips, bids a hundred and thirty and tells her he will have her broken within a week. His friend gives an uneasy laugh.

A hundred and forty. A hundred and forty-five. An expensive violin, or a fine gold alchemical scale.

The man in the front yanks his purse from his waist, searches through it with a finger before looking up triumphantly. “I’ll give you the purse! A hundred fifty, and not a sester more!”

Fenris scoffs and makes a dismissive gesture at them all. “Have her,” he says, shaking his head. “May you be bitten every night for the pleasure.”

The crowd laughs, and Bortas hooks a finger into the thick chain between Hawke’s wrists. “No higher, my lords?” he wheedles. “She’s spirited enough for two, after all.”

“I do not share,” Fenris says acidly, and the man in the front row gives a cheer. “Nor will I be cheated in a marketplace by an overpriced sale.”

“As you will, lord,” says Bortas, conciliatory as if he were the Archon himself, and turns back to the man in the front. “For final sale, then, ser—”

“ _Eugh_ ,” says Fenris, his annoyance palpable, and lifts one hand to arrest Bortas mid-word. “If I am to be cheated, let me at least win the prize. One hundred sixty-five, and she keeps the chain. I have none of my own with me.”

“My _lord_ ,” Bortas says gleefully, and the long tail of his hair falls smooth over his shoulder as he gives a flourishing bow. Hawke curls her lip and looks away from them both. The pulse jumping wildly in her throat must be only from rage and dread. Nothing else. Nothing less.

The man in the front searches his purse again, shouts in inarticulate frustration, and swivels to search blindly for Fenris over the onlookers clustered between them. “Look me up,” he calls, both grease-stained hands cupped around his mouth. “Dexton of Brucilia, if you leave anything of her when you’re through! I’ll pay you half back again!”

By now Fenris has made his way through the crowd, the assembled buyers parting before him easily. She doesn’t know if there are magisters here, if perhaps they think _he_ might be one instead in his expensive, understated clothing, his finely-worked staff in hand. He certainly has the bearing for it, his face cold enough to freeze stone. He doesn’t even look up at her.

Hate him. _Hate_ him.

“Sold to my lord,” says Bortas, grinning so broadly his gold teeth glitter, and oh, but _that_ hate comes so easily, even here. The heat races back to her cheeks along with all the powerless anger, and Hawke digs her fingernails deep into her palms as Bortas kneels and pulls her bill of sale from his waist-pouch. “If my lord will sign here, and here, and here. One hundred sixty-five solidii, and my very appreciative gratitude for your business. What name shall you have for her?”

“It doesn’t matter. What have you called her until now?”

“Caerula, lord, for her eyes. She refused to give us her name. Or rather, she gave too many, and even the lash couldn’t make her settle on the truth.”

“Caerula, then. Though this speaks ill of your ability to control your wares.”

“But see her rare beauty,” Bortas wheedles, and Fenris snorts at the obvious untruth. “Her power, then, and her body. She’ll serve you well, lord, I swear, and I’ll enter the bill of sale into the house of records before closing today. A quick, clean purchase. Nothing drawn out.” He proffers the papers once more.

Fenris signs. He holds the pen comfortably, gracefully, and when he is finished he pulls a heavy sack from his belted sash and carelessly counts out the Tevinter coin. The thwarted buyer’s eyes bulge from his head. _“Venhedis_ ,” he exclaims, elbowing his goggling friend, “the lord’s _filthy_! And you couldn’t spare one Marcher cunt for a poor lonely tradesman?”

He puts one friendly hand on Fenris’s shoulder, and Fenris goes as still as the etchings of bound slaves in the stone wall above them. “Touch me again,” he says quietly, without looking, “and I will flay you to the bone.”

The man jerks his hand back as if burnt, white-faced, and scowls. The crowd has gone very quiet. “Be off with you then,” he snaps, as if it might cover the sudden fear, “and may she pox your prick until it bursts.”

Fenris lifts his eyes, then, to meet the other man’s sneer, and after a moment the man ducks his head and stumbles away, closely followed by his friend. The crowd’s chatter resumes. Bortas makes a rude gesture after him, obviously intent on keeping the expensive lord’s good favor. “Here, ser,” he says, grasping Hawke’s lead, and he pulls so hard that she stumbles from the block, fails to right herself, and falls.

She manages to get her bound hands out just in time to avoid smashing her face into the wooden planks, but she’s not quick enough to dodge Bortas’s kick to her ribs. “Off,” he hisses at her yelp. “Wretch. Prostrate yourself properly or I’ll throttle the next girl in line.”

He knows well how to threaten her; she knows from experience he will follow through, occasionally even after he’s already won her compliance. Hawke closes her eyes and slides carefully from the stage to the dirt, then down to her knees, bending forward until her forehead brushes over the grey braided leather of Fenris’s boot. “This slave is grateful,” she says, her Tevene as rough as the sand-choked street. The stone is gritty, hot with sun against her bare knees; her back burns like fire at the unwelcome stretch to torn skin. She knows the white shift is spotted with blood between her shoulder blades, wonders vaguely if Bortas will beat her again for it before she goes.

“Get up,” Fenris snaps, imperious and irritated, “before you embarrass yourself further. If you’ve wasted my coin, slaver—” he adds to Bortas in open threat as Hawke stumbles to her feet, and Bortas puts up both hands in entreaty. The crowd already has turned its attention to the next sale behind, a tall man with pale skin and empty eyes being hustled to the block by Talmet. He’d not spoken a word to Hawke in six weeks despite being chained together for most of it. She doesn’t even know his name.

“Never so, my lord, Archon’s eye upon me.” Bortas bows again, forces Hawke to follow suit with a rough shove to the nape of her neck. “Threaten another with her pain and she’ll bend to your every word. My tongue rot if I lie.”

Fenris huffs, but accepts the small brass key Bortas offers, as well as a copy of his receipt and a short length of looped leather to clip to her lead. “We will see.” 

Bortas bows again, then turns back to his stage and the chattel still stood upon it. Fenris slips the leather loop around his wrist, his lip curled, and without another word leads the way out into the Cytates street proper, Hawke, still chained, stumbling helplessly behind him.

—

The tight chain at her ankles makes her take four or five mincing steps for every one of his, and she can’t keep up with his brisk walk. The third time she stumbles, visibly jerking Fenris off his pace, he backhands her across the cheek. It’s a real blow, hard enough to snap her head to the side before she goes down like a sack of bricks. Her elbow smashes into the cracked stone of the street; a few passersby complain as they are forced to weave around her sprawl. The rest of the traffic continues unabated; the merchants in their stalls on either side continue their calls for exotic spices and roasted nuts arranged in colorful, steaming jars, for jewels scattered across mirror-bright trays to throw back the sunlight in fractal rainbows, for silk and brocade shawls draped over every surface in every color imaginable. Fenris stands above her, a shadow against the sun, a total stranger who has just struck her to the ground.

She’s shocked at her own relief. It’s not an act, not like this; there’s nothing left in her for subterfuge, for the stone-heavy weight of one last played part. Not that she’d ever been good at such things anyway.

He raises his hand again, open threat, and Hawke cringes away. “Please,” she begs, still in her broken Tevene, “please. I will do better. I will—the chains—I will do better.”

Fenris stares at her, his eyes opaque and unreadable, his jaw tensed. A new master to an untested slave, untamed, untrained, wondering if she is worth the cost to his pride in this open market.

“Master,” Hawke pleads. His eyes don’t even flicker. A merchant in orange robes passes by, jostles Hawke’s shoulder roughly to clear the walk, and scoffs at them both for the disruption. An obvious old irritation, easily forgotten in a city where such things happen every hour. “I _will_ serve you, master.”

“Get up,” he says, his voice flat. “Fall again and I will stake you to the ground where you lie.”

She swallows and rises to her feet. The few onlookers that had been turned their way before, vaguely insulted that a slave should so inconvenience her master, turn back and resume their errands, satisfied that she has been taught her place. Bustling citizens dutifully fill the space she has left behind, flowing in and out of each other like water, and she is forced to step closer to Fenris to keep the lead slack. He turns without acknowledgement and strides forward once more, ever-so-slightly slower, just enough that she can keep pace without tripping.

A handful of Tevinter carriages line the end of the market street, narrow and square in the city’s style with a pair of blindered horses each, and Fenris leads the way to one three or four back in the line where the driver appears neither drunk nor particularly bright. A couple has already boarded ahead of them, their two athletic male slaves taking the lifted seat behind the box as their place; there is no room for Hawke between them, and, as Fenris points out to the stolid driver, such a new purchase— _especially_ of a once-freewoman—could hardly be trusted not to attempt escape.

The man agrees, his thick head bobbing up and down, and his eyes light even further at the coin Fenris presses into his hand. “But she sits on the floor,” the man insists, wrinkling his nose at her odor and her blood-stained shift. Fenris does not protest, and it is apparently common enough practice that the couple already seated inside the carriage do not comment, though the wife appears visibly annoyed and tucks her slippered feet under her skirts.

“Back to the far wall,” Fenris says, voice curt, and Hawke scrambles to obey. “Make yourself small. Smaller,” he snaps, and she hurriedly tucks her knees up to her chin and pulls her elbows in as tight as she can. “Eyes down. Do not move again.”

Another relief. She buries her forehead in her knees and closes her eyes, carefully shutting away the parts of her mind eager to begin turning over the trauma of the last six weeks. They are not safe yet; not even close. There will be time for the grief later, for the despair to overwhelm. Let her be nothing here instead, just a little longer. No sorrow. No fear. Quiet, quiet, quiet.

Fenris settles onto the hard bench at her side, his staff laid longwise above the back of the seat in its rest, and crosses one leg over the other impatiently. Between the fine embroidery of his overcoat and the sheer expense of the rest of his clothes, he is every inch the disgruntled magister. The carriage lurches as the driver swings into his seat and calls to his horses, then kicks into motion as they pull away from the line. The man across from Fenris asks, “A new buy?”

“Yes,” Fenris says, and she hears him sigh. “A poor impulse, I think. I wished to best another bidder rather than acquire the slave that came with the victory.”

The man makes an understanding noise; his beaded, gilt-embroidered slipper taps idly on the floor beside her foot. “So goes it, sometimes. I myself have twin field hands I bought as boys because Iratia liked their look. Didn’t even have a field proper at the time.”

The woman sniffs and looks out the carriage window. “Sweet eyes, they had,” she says, her voice sharp. “A matched set. I knew they would grow straight and strong.”

“Yes, yes,” her husband says, waving a hand. “And so they grew, and so a field was sown for them to work. We take our usefulness where we can. And our pleasures, hm?” he adds to his wife, needling. A shift of expensive fabric as she turns her head, a quick, irritated exhale, but she does not answer.

“Iratia disapproves that I am not jealous,” he tells Fenris, an obvious smile in his voice. “Sometimes there can be no pleasing a woman. Are you married, magister?”

“No.”

He chortles. “A wise man! You see, Iratia? He buys his playthings _before_ the wedding.”

“Parnenon, please.”

“Oh, fine, fine. Have it your own way, my dear. Our Maker knows you indulge my proclivities often enough.”

She sighs again, but soon enough her husband turns the conversation to the heat of the afternoon, to the peace of the countryside and the filth of the city, to the stormclouds that have threatened from the south for two days. Fenris answers politely, unmemorably, and Hawke lets the words wash over her, constant and formless as the sea. She cannot even revel in listening to Fenris’s voice after so long; to open the door to that relief would bring the rest with it before she is ready, and once that crush strikes her there will be no stopping it. Her cheek burns where Fenris struck her.

Hate him like all the rest. Hate him a little longer. You are strong enough for this.

Another quarter-hour passes before they reach their first destination, and Parnenon and his wife disembark with polite farewells at an open thermopolium near the heart of the city. The smell of roasting meat and salted vegetables wafts through the carriage to make her mouth water, but the driver shuts the door behind them before it can grow too strong for her to bear. The carriage jostles as the slaves disembark the back box, again as the driver retakes his seat, and then they’re moving once more.

“Stay there,” Fenris says quietly, still in Tevene.

She does. Safer this way, should the driver glance behind, should another passenger board unexpectedly. Easier, too. The moment he is gentle she will shatter apart into a thousand pieces, like a mirror flung to his feet.

This journey is longer. She doesn’t know how long—half an hour at least, she guesses, if the way the sun bakes across her bent back through the carriage window is any indication—but it’s long enough that when they finally draw into some unknown courtyard, gravel crunching under the carriage wheels, she struggles to unfold stiff arms, stiff hips, and her neck cracks as she lifts her head.

Her eyes are bleary too, pressed hard into her knees for too long, and she can barely make out the shape of the driver as he pulls open the carriage door and offers an obsequious arm to Fenris. “And you, out,” the driver adds to Hawke more sharply, lip curled as she crawls her shaky way from the carriage, struggles to stand on knees suddenly made of rubber. Another clink of coins as Fenris pays the driver for the rest; another crunch of loose stone as the carriage disappears back down the road. Hawke blinks again and again, trying to clear her vision, and only barely manages to catch herself as Fenris, lead in black-gloved hand once more, begins to walk towards the building on the far end of the courtyard.

An inn, she realizes, as the swinging placard at last resolves itself into a dark-painted, five-faceted diamond. An _old_ inn, well outside Cytates proper given the overgrown trees and fields that butt up against it on every side, but perhaps still within its legal borders. Cytates is moderate enough in size, but its active, bustling slave market is its heart, and only a few miles from its main streets the businesses begin to dwindle into more scattered residences and occasional public lodgings. She thinks they are further south than they were—the distant stormclouds certainly seem darker, more robust—but she has little sense of direction at the best of times, and none at all from the floor of a too-small carriage. To be out of the city is victory enough.

The courtyard is narrow, lined in cracked, age-stained marble benches, and discolored gravel surrounds a round central fountain that once held four stone dolphins leaping towards a center urn. Only two dolphins are left, the others broken and missing, and the urn has split, a long, jagged gash splintering down one side; water still trickles plaintively from the gap into the surrounding leaf-choked pool, not quite fetid but tinged a decided green. The building itself stands two stories tall, long and shallow, once-cream clay walls and rounded terracotta roof tiles now stained alike to a dingy, aged brown, broken only where wisteria has overgrown the brick in a purple cloak. Scaffolding has been erected on one end where a handful of roof tiles are visibly displaced, though the rickety ties to its joists suggest it is as in poor a shape as the rest.

The main doors, though, are made of stout wood and well cared for, and when Hawke follows Fenris into the shadowed interior she is surprised to find it much better maintained than the outside. The walls here are good wood, stained a golden gleaming brown in the late afternoon sunlight; red curtains frame iron-wrought windows, and brocaded rugs soften the floor’s stone pavers. A cheerful fire dances in a broad hearth across the main room, three or four pots bubbling over on a rack atop it, and several chairs and couches, patched and worn but clean, have been arranged invitingly around its warmth.

A man enters from a far hallway and bustles towards them, sturdy and thick-bearded, wiping his hands on his apron before untying it and tossing it over a chair. He wears good cloth beneath, not very expensive but carefully tailored, and a single gold chain around his neck. A far cry from her brass collar, Hawke thinks, not without bitterness, and is genuinely shaken when Fenris snaps the lead hard between them.

“Where,” he says to her softly, dangerous threat in every word, “do you look, slave?”

“Master,” she gasps, and immediately fixes her eyes to the braiding across the toes of his leather boots. “I’m sorry.”

“Be quiet. Good afternoon, ser. Are you the landlord here? I am told you have rooms.”

“Yes, magister,” says the man. A deep voice, rough as his gravel courtyard. “We’re only four in house tonight, so your lordship may have his choice for the rest. One night only?”

“Yes. I must travel hard tomorrow. However, I have found myself saddled with this—” he jerks the lead again, and Hawke stumbles a step nearer, “—and so must establish certain…boundaries tonight before continuing.”

“Of course, magister.” The innkeeper moves behind a large polished desk, pulls a ledger from a locked drawer, and turns the page for a new entry. “I’ve a room on the second floor that will do well for you, magister, if I may recommend it to you. Very fine, very private.” The man pauses, glances between them, and adds more quietly, “Thick walls, should it please you, my lord.”

Fenris gives a cold smile in answer, and a shudder runs lazily down Hawke’s spine. It does not matter that she knows his heart better than her own; there is a promise of pain in that smile, and she fears it. “I will take it. I sent a boy on with my bags this morning in anticipation; he should be here within the hour. I wish for them to be delivered immediately.”

“Yes, magister. Should I have your girl fetch them when they come?”

“This thing? She would run the instant the lead left my hand.” He smiles again, icy, displeased. “Have the bags brought to me. She will be otherwise occupied.”

Her stomach churns; she does not fight the horror and revulsion she knows bleed across her face. The innkeeper’s eyes flash for a moment with pity, but it’s buried all too swiftly in businesslike attention as he picks up his pen. “What name shall I lodge, magister?”

“Dimonidus of Carastes. The slave is Caerula.”

“A long journey indeed, magister. May the Maker guide you home safely enough.” He drops the pen back in its well and blots the ink. “You honor my house with your presence tonight. My daughter will show you to your room. Dusana?”

A slip of a girl pushes away from the doorway to their left, and Hawke flinches in real surprise, flinches again at the resulting streak of fire down her back. A woman perhaps in her early twenties, fine-boned, with black hair in a glossy bun at the nape of her neck; medium olive skin, just a touch darker than Fenris’s, and eyes as black as sloe. Her lips press tightly together in disapproval as she bows to Fenris. “Magister,” she echoes, “I welcome you and yours to our home.”

Fenris barely looks at her. “The room.”

“I will show you, magister.”

She takes them into the sitting room with the grand hearth. A staircase on the far wall leads to the second story, the same polished gold wood as the walls and the balustrade carved with dancing figures. Fenris follows Dusana up the steps without remark, his staff tapping on each step, and it is not until the lead snaps taut around his wrist that they realize Hawke has not come along.

She stands at the bottom step, helpless. The chain is too tight around her ankles for her to take the stair’s height; with her hands still bound at her waist she cannot even grip the railing for stability. She looks up to Fenris, down again at her bare, dirty feet, and up once more, unsure of what words she might use to beg.

Fenris waits, eyebrow lifted almost to the grey-wool scarf that hides his hair, and says nothing. Dusana stands a step above, a muscle jumping in her jaw. It is an excruciating moment, dragged out so long Hawke thinks she might as well die here and let the ash be blown into the hearth with the rest; at last, Fenris says, “Well?”

She must try, then. He would not wait if it could not be done. And indeed, though it is the most graceless she has ever been, she discovers if she stands on the toes of one foot, and turns to the side just so, she can eke the edge of the other onto the lip of each step enough to take her weight. It is slow going, slow enough Fenris eventually hands her her own lead and goes to wait on the landing above with Dusana. They watch her without speaking, and the tide-rough rise of new humiliation washes over her.

Still, she eventually gains the landing, and Fenris takes up her lead again without comment. The second floor is partially open to the room below, the balustrade continuing along a small balcony that overlooks the hearth so that it may warm both levels at once. Dusana leads them down the broad central hallway, past a half-dozen empty rooms, to the very end of the building. One door has been set here, a little finer than the rest, and it is this door she unlocks and opens wide, bowing again to Fenris as she gestures him to enter.

He does, unimpressed, and Hawke follows. The room is large indeed. A satisfyingly plump four-poster bed has been set central in the far wall, elegant nightstands on either side holding twin candelabra and a basin and ewer of clean water. Late afternoon sunlight pours in through the open windows over a large dresser and wardrobe, both in the same carved style as the stairs; a slim writing desk with paper invitingly arranged atop its surface; a second fireplace behind an iron grating, smaller than the great room’s below but with fresh logs and no whiff of errant smoke. A small settee has been placed before the fire, a wooden armchair to its right with a homemade quilt folded over one arm. As comfortable a room as she has seen since Kirkwall, Hawke thinks.

Kirkwall. She hasn’t thought of the city in weeks. Her world has narrowed to only each hour at a time, no more, and—no. Not yet. Not yet. Fenris is speaking; let that be the only thing that matters for a little longer.

“—to wash?” he asks Dusana. “As you can see, it is not something that may be delayed much longer.”

“Yes, lord,” Dusana says, and with a deferential bow she opens the room’s second door. A small, furnished bathing room has been attached to the suite, Hawke realizes, luxurious privacy for the inn’s most honored guests. The bathtub is large, made of ceramic and copper, gleaming in the light thrown by the high, rippled-glass windows lining the room; a slender table along one wall holds trays of hair oils, soaps, sandstone, and several folded towels. Even the floor’s blue and grey checked tiles shine with fresh wax.

“No pump,” Fenris says, annoyed.

“No, lord, but there is a drain, and when you are ready I will have the men fill the tub. We have a rune-set furnace downstairs to heat the water. It will take no more than a few minutes.”

Fenris gives a noncommittal hum, turns back to the main room, and nearly collides with Hawke where she stands obediently at his back. She staggers, trying without success to get out of his way, and he shoves past her in irritation. “Move aside,” he snaps, thrusting her lead at her once more, and waves a hand at the wall. “Find a corner and stand in it. Be still until I want you.”

“Master,” she whispers, and goes. Dusana watches in angry silence, slim black brows drawn low, but does not argue, and when Fenris returns his attention to the innkeeper’s daughter Hawke surreptitiously leans against the painted wainscoting. It’s cool against her bare arms, soothing on her sore back. She is privately grateful for the dismissal; the horror is closer now than it has ever been, oppressive in her mind as a storm surge heaving against the dam, and the last threads of her control are rapidly beginning to fray. She closes her eyes, rests her temple against wood, and scrapes together the last of her resolve.

A cheerful young voice down the hall calls for the magister Dimonidus: the boy Fenris had mentioned earlier, dirty to the hairline and grinning through two missing teeth as he delivers Fenris’s bags. Dusana directs him where to place the luggage, a large, square case with reinforced hinges and a smaller rucksack with broad straps, fine leather tooling etched across its face. Hawke’s gift to Fenris last year for Satinalia; she’d told him to carry more with him than old grudges. Fenris pays the boy when he is through, barely looking at him, and ignores the curious glance he gives Hawke as he leaves. His whistle carries down the hallway long after he is gone.

“Anything else, my lord?”

Fenris stifles a bored yawn behind an elegant hand, moves to lean his staff against the edge of the writing desk. “Have the bath drawn. Hot. I wish to rid myself of this road dust immediately. Does an inn such as this stock both salts and scent?”

The question positively drips condescension, and Dusana flushes. “Of course, magister.”

“Bring them both. And a pair of buckets filled with fresh water.” He pauses, casts a critical eye over Hawke in the corner. “Three buckets, perhaps.” Her turn to color, ashamed; she has never smelled so terrible in her life. Fenris continues, uninterested in her humiliation. “And a hot meal. Whatever your kitchens have prepared will be sufficient. I do not require a separate menu.”

Magnanimity itself. “Yes, magister,” Dusana says again, but hesitates. “Shall I bring food for her as well?”

Now Fenris looks at the innkeeper’s daughter, a half-glance as sharp as a turned blade. His voice is even, smooth. “You are very concerned for the well-being of my slave.”

Dusana, perhaps sensing the danger in that impeccable control, drops her eyes. “Only so that you are well served, magister.”

“Hm. You may bring her something adequate.”

“My gratitude, magister.”

Fenris smiles without amusement. “Indeed. Then I will add this: once the food is delivered and the bath drawn I do not wish to be disturbed again tonight. I will block the door if necessary. If I discover that anyone in this household has approached this room before noon tomorrow without my express permission, I will have them skinned inch by inch in the arena’s heart until they are dead.” He waits, allowing the full force of the threat to sink in, then asks in the same cool tone, “Do you understand me, Dusana?”

“Yes, magister,” Dusana whispers, pale as a sheet beneath her olive coloring, though the look she throws Hawke in her corner is open pity. “I swear, you and your slave will not be disturbed.”

“Your consideration for Caerula’s comfort remains gratifying.” A clear warning in that, and Dusana knows it; she ducks her head and withdraws without another word, leaving the door cracked behind her.

Within a quarter-hour, all is as Fenris has requested. Two men in aprons fill the tub quickly with water so hot it must near boiling; steam gently scented with lemon and sandalwood wafts out into the main room with every pass through the door. The buckets are brought, filled, and lined up neatly on the tile beside the tub; a moment later Dusana knocks and enters with another girl behind, both carrying trays loaded with food. Fenris’s plate is obvious enough, teak inlay lining the platter and runed silver cloches covering each dish to keep in the heat; a decanter of chilled wine follows, its silver belly already beading water against the warmth spilling out of the bathing room.

A second tray is placed on the floor by Hawke’s filthy feet. Unsanded pine, that one, with a small bowl of overboiled vegetables, a cup of water, and a little wooden plate of cold-cut chicken. Still a better meal than she’s had in weeks, and her stomach loudly protests even this delay. Neither Fenris nor Dusana notice.

“The bellpull is by the bed, magister,” Dusana says respectfully, though her eyes are trained on the red rug. “There are servants awake around the clock to meet any of your needs; you have only to ask.”

“My needs will be met tonight without your assistance,” Fenris says, still smiling, a soft and dangerous promise. “You may go.”

Dusana sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Magister,” she murmurs again with a bow, and she withdraws, closing the door behind her.

And just like that, at last—they are alone.

—


	2. Chapter 2

“Wait,” says Fenris quietly, and Hawke, pleasantly blank, waits. The cruelty is gone from his voice, though he still does not look at her. Instead he goes to the door and closes his eyes, listening carefully; after a minute or two he straightens and grips the edge of the heavy carved dresser along the wall, dragging it sideways with the quiet scrape of wood on wood until it blocks the door altogether. He tests that the door will not open against its weight even the slightest crack; when he is satisfied he goes to the fireplace and listens there as well, and to the window, and to the drain in the bathing room beneath the shining bathtub. He licks his fingertips and holds them to the places where the walls meet the ceiling, to the joists in the wainscoting and the floorboards, searching for any breeze that might mark a gap where a hidden ear could listen, and when that is finished he carefully draws the heavy curtains closed over the large window by the bed, turning the gold afternoon sun into a dim pink glow that suffuses the room, softening every edge and shadow all at once.

Then Fenris pulls the cloth from his head and the gloves from his hands and throws them aside, and he comes to where Hawke has waited quietly in the corner, patient and unmoving, for the last half-hour. He brushes his fingers over her forehead, her cheeks, her jaw, and he is trembling, trembling, trembling now where he was so steady before—

He cups her face in his hands, gently, so gently, and feathers his thumbs over her bruised cheeks, and he breathes, “ _Hawke_.”

Devastating, the sound of her name in his voice. She hasn’t heard the word in almost two months, let alone from him whom she loves best, and the weight of it beats all the air from her lungs in one blow.

His eyes search hers, the woods-moss green tight with agony. Each time she blinks her vision seems to become a little clearer, the world a little more vibrant, as if scales have begun to fall away, as if she is waking up at last.

The lines around his mouth have carved deep in the last two months. His eyes clench shut and open again, shining with grief, to fix on her face. “Hawke,” he whispers again, ragged as a torn sail, “do you know me?”

He doesn’t know. What they’ve done to her, what she’s survived—he can’t possibly—but he knows enough to ask. Her throat grows knot-tight, treacherous with the threat of tears, and she swallows hard, over and over, until the sting abates. “Yes,” she says thickly, and the relief that washes over him is harrowing. “Yes. I…”

“Hawke,” he says again, as if he knows how hearing it unmakes and restores her at once, “do you know who _you_ are?”

An impossible question. An impossible answer. She opens her mouth as though words might spring forward, fully formed, and finds nothing to explain the wrenching apart of all she once had been. “I…” she starts again, and when her voice fails she looks up at him instead as if the silence might answer for her.

Fenris slides his thumb along her cheekbones again, lingering over the one he struck in the street. His full lips twist unsteadily with fresh pain, but he stifles it soon enough, as if he knows she can’t yet bear the weight of another’s suffering—and that recognition is itself a distant wound—before he gently slides his fingers back into the filthy stinking nest of her hair and pulls her in to his chest.

How funny, that at last when she would like to cry there are no tears to be had. She lowers her forehead to his shoulder, the coat’s stiff embroidery scratching, and lets him wrap one arm snug around her neck and shoulders and the other gently, carefully, around her waist. He’s seen the blood-stripes across her shift; he knows where he may press and where he should not.

She can feel him breathe, each one juddering on the inhale. She can _smell_ him, even through her own reek, leather and the cold tang of the lyrium and the salt sweat on his skin, familiar as the back of her hand. There is nothing else in the world she can imagine to be better in this moment, and Fenris does not object when she buries her face farther into him and drags in a deep breath through her nose.

They stand there a long time. Every now and then the rose-gold shadows slip along Fenris’s cambric shirt with a shift of cloud beyond the curtain, dance over her bare toes where they’re tucked between Fenris’s boots, linger in the lines of the gold thread at his collar and his knees. The day’s warmth begins to diminish with the hours; Fenris remains as warm as he has ever been, Tevinter heat deep in the heart of him, his pulse thudding hard and fast in her ears.

“Hawke,” he murmurs, his arms tightening, though still stopping just before the point of pain. “Hawke, Hawke.” Then, in Tevene: “I feared for you. Hawke, I was so afraid…”

She turns her face against his throat. She should feel guilty, she thinks vaguely, and isn’t certain for what. For the dirt and sweat she smears across him with every movement. For the smell. For the worry, for the chase…for a not-insignificant pile of gold he’s just spent to buy back her own self. She should feel guilty. She thinks she might be—or perhaps not. There’s so much suffering seeded through her now, like veins of ore in a rocky cliff, that she can’t tell what is real and what is the memory of grief.

Eventually, he drags in a shuddering breath and pulls away, though he does not release his hold on her shoulders. “Come,” he says softly. “Sit.” A suggestion only, no demand. “Here. I will help you.”

His hands are so careful at her elbow, her waist, as he helps her to the russet-colored settee before the low-burning fire. His calluses are comfortingly rough even as her stiff hips, her aching knees, her back all protest the change. Now that she is allowed to feel the hurt, each one seems over-eager to make itself known in white, pounding stripes. The pressure of fear had suppressed them for so long; now they surface at last like a thousand little fish, nibbling the surface of a sea after idly scattered crumbs.

Fenris kneels at her feet, his head bent. He reaches into the sash at his waist; Bortas’s small brass key emerges between his lyrium-marked fingers, and he cups her ankle carefully before setting to work on the lock. It clicks soon enough, and the catch gives way, and the hinge at her heel creaks as he pries open the metal ring.

She had not realized how terrible the manacles had been. After a week the ache in her ankles had become a constant thing, the lance of agony at every mincing step a background hum, easily ignored. But now—raw blisters over every inch of skin beneath, dried blood where the metal cut deepest, the dark specks of flea bites and the scabs where she scratched them—she is reminded as if it were the first day she had been bound, after she had tried to run and been dragged back by her hair. 

The manacle around her other ankle follows, the skin there just as bad, and the short chain between them tinkles cheerfully as Fenris shoves the whole set to the side. Her hands are next. The brass key turns smoothly in their locks, freeing her wrists for the first time in six weeks. The chain around her waist must be next, then, still fixed via a length of thick brass links to the cuffs that had restrained her for Bortas’s pleasure. Not so much dried blood around her wrists, her waist; only deep purple and green bruises and an infected sore at the base of her right palm. These had been easier to protect when they drove her ahead of the caravan on foot.

Fenris gathers up the lot, brass draping over his thigh in links as broad as her thumb, as narrow as a necklace. “I should destroy these,” he murmurs. “Break them, cast them into the nearest river.” It is an offer, not an edict. She shakes her head.

“Keep them.” Her throat is so rough, as if someone had scraped their fingernails up and down from the inside. “In case…”

Fenris sucks in a breath, his green eyes wide, and leans forward to cup her cheek. “Hawke,” he says, low, urgent, forcing her to meet his look. “Do you understand that you will never wear these again? Never. _Never_. I will wipe this city from the face of the earth before you walk it chained again.”

She hesitates, then nods. Fenris winces, smooths a bit of loose hair from her eyelashes, and when Hawke cannot help but lean into the touch he rests his forehead gently against hers. “Hawke,” he says again, and her stomach jumps as it has every time at her name. “Do you wish to keep them?”

No judgement in his voice. No strength to figure out what her answer ought to be. “I don’t know.”

“Then—I will set them aside for now. For now.”

She gives a jerk of a nod, and after a moment he pulls away, just an inch or two, to inspect the thick brass collar around her throat. She knows there is a socket there for the key he holds, the same as the rest, but his black brows furrow as he traces its edges with his fingernail. She fights through the ache as she swallows. “He could touch it.” She cannot say Bortas’s name aloud. “Loosen…the binding on my magic without removing the whole thing. I don’t know how.”

“This is new since I was last here. I do not know it.” He hesitates, then gently lifts her chin out of the way and guides the key into the lock.

She doesn’t even know what she expects. The slow rising of her power like a groundswell after rain, perhaps; a frozen lake begun to thaw. She does _not_ expect every inch of her skin to burst into white-hot flame, her dormant magic exploding after six weeks of confinement like a bomb from its cage. The force slams her head back against the sofa, her eyes fixed sightless and unseeing on the ceiling; her mouth stretches open in a silent scream. Her heels scrape across the wooden floor—her fingernails catch on something, tear blindly until it rips. Sparks fly from her skin, arcing up in sun-bright bursts. She is burning alive in this borrowed room—

“Stop—” she wheezes, her breath high and whistling, not even enough strength to scream. “Make it stop—make it— _please—_ ”

Fenris gasps her name, fumbles at her throat. And then—

—it _stops_.

Her thready breaths shudder through the room. It’s a violent counterpoint to the soft sunlight, now edging purple with dusk, still glowing around them. Muscles jump in her back, her neck, making her limbs twitch beyond her control; she does not have the strength to lift her head. Only the weight of Fenris gingerly kneeling on the sofa beside her tells her he still lives.

“Hawke,” he says, his voice thin with horror. “Are you—I—”

She manages to lift a deprecating hand, which he catches and presses between both of his own. “Survivable,” she manages, an impossible ghost of a smile on her lips, and somehow it is the closest she has felt to herself since the day her magic was sealed away.

Is _still_ sealed, she realizes, probing the place in her heart where the twist of her magic usually burns. For the best, perhaps. After all of this, after everything, to die from her own magic would be an end so ignominious even Varric would not be able to salvage it.

Fenris touches her throat carefully, traces up to her jaw. “I relocked it. I did not know what—what else to do.”

This time the joke rises ready to her lips, spills out without conscious decision. “Just don’t…lose the key.”

He allows her a brief, faint smile, though it is still hard at the corners, and as her eyes fall shut he gathers her into his arms. No pressure, no demand; only a soft embrace on this borrowed settee, her head resting on the breast of his overcoat, her hands loosely curled at her own throat. Her knees loop over his where they are bent, and he strokes up and down her back, avoiding the ridge of the collar and the places where the lash broke the skin. Every now and then he presses a sober kiss to the top of her head as the last of the aftershocks work themselves out of her system. She thinks she ought to be afraid; instead she is only glad her magic still exists at all.

At last, her skin goes quiet, her limbs lax with exhaustion; the fiery tingling in her fingers fades altogether. She has just begun to consider falling dead asleep where she lies when Fenris stirs, ducks his head to look into her face. “Wait. Let me take you to the bath.”

The ghost of a smile returns again, easier this time. “I don’t know what you imply, serah.”

This time his amusement is real, and Fenris brushes his mouth tenderly over her temple before rising. He takes a moment to shed his overcoat and his boots, shucking them to the foot of the bed; then, barefooted, he pulls her up from the settee. His black trousers are banded with leather at the cuffs too, she sees, loose to the knees and then fitted snug along his calves and ankles. Just like Fenris, if he must have a thing, to only have the finest of its kind.

She smiles at the thought, distracted, and nearly overbalances at her first real, full step in six weeks. Fenris grips her arms until the terrible trembling of her knees is finished, braced as solid as the earth.

She doesn’t apologize, even through the humiliation, and after the third or fourth step her legs remember how they ought to go and Fenris does not have to bear so much of her weight. He leads her to the bathing room, settles her on the low stool dragged beside the bathtub, and fetches one of the trays of oils and soaps from the far wall. One of the smaller towels he dips in the still-steaming bathwater to warm, and then he comes to kneel at her feet once more.

“The shift must come off,” he says, carefully neutral. “I will help you if you wish.”

She mimics his tone, as if that might keep the horror at a distance. “The blood has dried to it. I doubt I can get it off without you.”

“When was the beating?”

“Yesterday. And the day before.” She drops her face into her hand, the new-exposed sore on her wrist stretching painfully with the movement. “A week before that, too. And before…I’ve forgotten. It’s certainly never had a chance to heal.”

“A whip?”

“A rod, mostly. It broke ribs more often than skin. Once or twice the whip. He kept a medic in case he put one of us too near death, but she was no mage. Only poultices, creams. A little elfroot for the worst of it. And—”

Fenris has worked his thumbs under the hem of the shift where it hits her thighs while she’s been talking. Her skin crawls at the touch—even this touch, beloved, even _Fenris_ —and she shudders in horror, the rest of whatever she’d meant to say vanished like mist.

He sees it and instantly withdraws. She misses him almost immediately, hates herself for the baffling hypocrisy, and reaches to catch his hands in her own. “Wait. Please. I…” _I’m sorry_ , she wants to say, but she can’t force the words to come.

He presses the back of her hand to his cheek and pushes to his feet. “All is well,” he tells her softly, and circles the stool to stand at her shoulder. “If you can start it, I will do the rest.”

She can do that. It takes some trying, her thighs not quite strong enough to lift her yet after the shock of magic, but soon enough the shift’s hem is rucked up at her waist, unthwarted for the first time since her capture by the brass chain. Fenris drapes the warm, wet cloth over her back as she works, damp heat spreading from shoulder to shoulder and down her spine. It stings over the worst of the stripes, but the rest of it is the first real warmth she’s had since she was taken, and she revels in it.

“This may hurt you,” Fenris tells her as he begins. It is slow work, peeling the soaked white fabric from old scabs, and now and then one tears open again despite his best efforts and he must wait, clean cloth pressed to the wound, until it stops bleeding. It does hurt, little stings like ant-bites, but it is nothing given what came before, and she tells him so. He only shakes his head at that, works another inch or two of wet linsey from her back.

He is halfway through before Hawke realizes she might aid in her own cleaning. The soap and water are near enough, after all; when she asks Fenris brings her another soft towel, and despite her shaking she works the soap into an expensive, sweet-smelling lather that she drags across her bare arms. It is exceedingly luxurious—even in Kirkwall she had never splurged on anything more than rocky lye—but even better is watching layer upon layer of old dirt sluice from her skin and swirl down the drain beneath them.

She has both arms and one thigh clean—or clean enough—when Fenris gets the last of the shift loose. “Raise your arms,” he says, and when she does he carefully slips it over her head and off altogether, leaving her in nothing but the brass collar around her throat. Even with the linsey clenched in his fist she can see its bloodstains, brown with age, and this time when he walks purposefully to the fireplace in the other room she does not stop him. The flames lick at the cloth hungrily as Fenris returns; in a minute or two it is well on its way to ash. She swallows. “Good riddance.”

Fenris inclines his head, unsmiling, and loosens the leather bands at his wrists until he can roll the sleeves of his fine cambric shirt up past his elbows. The grey sash at his waist he unknots too, tossing it one-handed to the doorway behind him where its long tail will not drag through the water. He selects one vial from the soaps tray, then another, and as Hawke resumes wiping herself down he moves to her back again, the wounds now exposed for his perusal.

It would be easier if she could not hear how harsh he breathed at the sight. Still, he says nothing, and he is gentle as he begins to rub a cool, soothing lotion across the worst places. Somehow this touch is not so bad, even when he reaches the lash-marks that curl over the top of her arse and wrap around her hips, and they work together in silence until he is finished and she has rinsed everything she can reach at least once.

“There,” says Fenris unnecessarily, and he comes once more to kneel where she can see him. Hawke lifts her eyes to him slowly; now without the grime he will know—he will _know—_ but she won’t spare herself his reaction. If she loses him for this, better to know now than force either of them to pretend elsewise even a moment longer.

Red welts on the insides of both thighs; five-fingered bruises at her waist, breasts, and throat. Old bites—most on their way to healing—at her collarbones and right hip. For all the brutality of the manacles, this is the worst of it all; she might have been marked like a map.

Even without words, Fenris seems to understand what she asks. He looks her over, lingering where the bruises are worst, sparing himself no part of the catalogue of horrors brought down upon her while she was chained. He watches her for permission, then touches carefully—so carefully—one of the worst bruises on the side of her left breast, and an imprint of teeth at her throat, and the purple-green outline of a hand at the jut of her hipbone.

He tries—for her, he tries to keep his face blank, she can tell, but the lyrium begins to go off in little storms all along his forearms and neck, lighting his black shirt from beneath like a thunderhead. His fingers twitch, then spasm along her shoulder; his jaw clenches so hard she can hear it creak.

“I could not find you,” he manages at last, ragged anguish. “Ah, _Hawke_. Hawke, I am sorry. So sorry. I—”

He breaks off into a rush of Tevene, curses and prayers and grief mixed so rapidly she can only pick out a word here and there. He covers his face with his hands, curled into himself on the tile floor of the steaming bathroom, presses his wrists to his eyes to stem the furious tears.

She can’t bear this. “Fenris,” she says, just as rough, and pulls him into her arms as best she can. He comes to meet her like a man drowning, still on his knees, wraps one desperate arm around her waist and the other around the back of her shoulder, taking care even now to avoid the places most damaged. She buries herself in his neck, the high black collar softer now without the overcoat’s embroidery, and cannot tell who is shuddering more.

“It’s not so bad,” she whispers. He shakes his head against her, and she is surprised by the sudden urge to smile; somehow, to comfort him is comfort itself. “It was worst at the very beginning, I swear. It is not so fresh. Very little of it, anyway.”

“Are you with child?”

“No. I bled last week. Well, in the usual way, on top of the rest.”

He swallows so hard she can feel it. “When you are well,” he starts, chokes, and must start again, “when you are well I will take you to kill him.”

“Him and Talmet.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I _will_ kill them,” she says, a promise to Fenris and to herself, and then she pulls back just enough that she may press her lips to Fenris’s cheek, just below his eye. “It will not be a good death,” she warns him.

“Anything you wish.” He means it, too; his eyes burn with more than tears when he looks up at her. “I will go wherever you lead, Hawke.”

And he would, she knows. He would walk with her into the doors of the Black Spire itself, would follow her to the foot of the Archon’s throne if she asked. He would let her destroy them both without a word. It is the only thing that keeps her from drowning beneath the hate.

She looses one breath, then another, and eventually her heart calms. The lyrium still flickers every now and then, occasionally thrumming through her skin when it lights where he touches her, but soon enough she lets him go, and he wipes his face, and they return together to the business of ridding Hawke of the stink she’s carried for weeks.

Thanks to her back, she can easily reach neither her feet nor her hair, which nearly crunches as she turns. Fenris rinses her head thoroughly from one of the buckets, works another finely-scented soap through the wet strands; the tingling pleasure of him massaging her scalp is enough to nearly put her to sleep again, and it is only the soft, pleased chuckle at her satisfaction that keeps her conscious out of spite. When her hair is white with lather he leaves it to soak and turns his attention to her feet; these he rubs too, once they are truly clean, his knuckles digging long strokes into the arches, his thumbs pressing behind the balls of each foot to work out the aches she’s had so long she’s almost forgotten them. He clips the nails short and cleans beneath them; he trims the ragged edge of a callus where it tore weeks ago and has bled ever since, and rubs a pumice stone over her heels until they are smooth.

Some ways into it, she reaches out and runs her hand through his white hair and along the line of one pointed ear, for no other reason than that she wishes to. He stills just a moment, then gives her a soft smile up through his lashes that hurts her heart. _Oh_ , how she loves him, she thinks; instead she says, “You’re kinder to me than I ever was.”

“Should I stop?”

“Only if you’re prepared for me to return the favor.”

Fenris shakes his head at that, looking down as he washes the last of the suds from her ankle. “Another time, perhaps.”

“When I less resemble a butcher’s block, you mean. Ah, if you insist.”

He flinches, but he’s still smiling as he stands. “Are you ready for the bath? I will help you.”

The bath? The _bathtub_ , she realizes, blinking, and looks to its gently steaming surface as if it might hold the answer to some enormous question. “It was—I thought it was drawn for you.”

“ _Hawke_ ,” he says, longsuffering—a good sign, wonderful, that he will still tease her even now—and draws a bit of soapy hair back from her cheek. “Here. Brace on me—here. Be careful; it will sting at first.”

She only slips once, but Fenris has her secure enough it doesn’t matter, and soon she is carefully installed in the enormous tub. Her back does sting, as Fenris had promised, but the deep and penetrating heat of the water is better yet, and when she gingerly leans back against the ceramic curve the bathwater rises almost to her chin.

It is, quite possibly, the most wonderful bath she has ever had.

Fenris bustles for the first few minutes as she does nothing but soak, adding certain salts to promote sleep and quick healing, spooning in other oils and scents he knows she likes solely for the pleasure of it. The smell of cardamom and oranges begins to fill the room, thick and heavy as syrup; Hawke drops a little deeper beneath the surface, frothed now with soapy bubbles, and shuts her eyes.

A dream, perhaps. A long dream, and at the end of it she will wake unscarred in her bed at her mother’s home in Kirkwall, where only the old pains are left to bruise. Her dog will bound up onto the bed; Fenris will grumble, turn over in his sleep, and press his nose to the back of her neck. Isabela will throw some pebble at her window to wake them both; Merrill will kick her heels against the stone wall while she waits below, singing. 

His hands are in her hair again, gently working the soap through it one last time before rinsing. He dips the bucket into the bathtub by her knees, rinses her hair again, then gathers the black weight of it in one hand and finger-combs it to the side, out of her way. He moves afterwards to the back of her neck, digging at the long lines of tension there beneath the carved brass collar, and Hawke lets out a long sigh.

“I wonder they let you keep your hair,” he says, matter-of-fact.

“He said I would look like a long-nosed fox without it. Well, then he said a mabari instead, because it was more fitting for a Marcher bitch.”

“He did not know you are Fereldan.”

“I didn’t volunteer it, no.”

“Or your name.”

“That secret was harder to keep, funnily enough.” She leans her head back on the tub’s rim, stares up at the painted ceiling. Fenris’s massage has moved to her shoulders just below the surface of the water. “I gave it to him once, actually. Somewhere around the second week, when I thought he might really kill me. He didn’t believe me, so I decided I might as well keep going. What does ‘Caerula’ mean?”

“Blue.”

“Of course.” She sighs again, sinks into the water until only her eyes remain above it. “Bleh,” she says into a cloud of bubbles, disgusted, and watches them burst soundlessly into the soapy froth.

“Your eyes are lovely,” says Fenris above her head. Not a compliment; a frank statement of fact. “Many slaves are named after some notable feature, or some instrument or tool that was nearby when they were born.”

Hawke snorts, immediately regrets it when her nose twinges. Bortas had gone to great lengths to avoid breaking the already-long feature, but Talmet had cracked it often enough when she annoyed him. She rises enough from the water to grumble, “Or some animal they find admirable?”

“Just so.”

He finishes with her shoulders and moves more carefully to her upper arms. She lets him, reveling in the novelty of a touch that is not cruel, even though the smell of oranges has begun to fade and the bathwater to cool at last. At least the salts no longer sting her back.

Eventually, however, the water grows cold past comfort, her fingertips wrinkle, and other needs make themselves known. A comfortable lassitude has spiraled throughout her limbs, but with Fenris’s help she manages to lurch to her feet, then stagger from the bathtub to the cool grey tile without falling. He wraps her in an enormous white towel softer than anything she owns in Kirkwall, helps her to the pot in the corner, then eases her back into the main bedroom where the fire still burns merrily in the hearth.

She is suddenly so tired. Even the sheer relief of walking with normal-sized steps is not enough to battle the exhaustion dragging down her eyelids, drooping her shoulders. “I don’t think I’ll last much longer,” she admits, and Fenris gives a comforting squeeze of her arm.

“Just a few minutes more. You must eat something worthwhile.”

“You’re just trying to fatten me up.”

“Yes,” he says without remorse, and deposits her back on the settee before the fire. He goes to his luggage beside the bed and heaves the larger square case to its side; from the neatly folded piles within he pulls out smallclothes, a fine sleeveless tunic, and matching loose leggings in the Tevinter sleeping style. “But these, first.”

It is an honest joy to have proper smallclothes again, even without a breastband she can’t wear at the moment anyway, and she tugs her way into them as Fenris applies one last layer of salve to her beaten back. She almost doesn’t make the joke, but—it’s somehow worse if she doesn’t face it. “I’m warning you now: don’t expect me to keep up with their shaving.”

Fenris goes so suddenly still she thinks she’s hurt him, but he pulls the shirt over her head soon enough, and when his face emerges on the other side he is smiling. He helps clear her wet hair from the collar, then cups her jaw. “No,” he agrees firmly. “I think not.”

She stands long enough to get the leggings tied securely at her waist, but before she can resettle herself Fenris abruptly swivels to face the door, green eyes narrowed to slits. Hawke swallows, all her fear suddenly lodged in her throat. “What is it?”

“Wait,” he says, his hand dropping to the curve of her neck, then pads on soundless bare feet to stand against the dresser still blocking the door’s entrance. He rests his fingertips atop its polished surface, head down, eyes closed, listening—and now she can hear it too, a faint rustle on the other side as someone shifts their weight. Listening themselves, she thinks, one ear pressed where it ought not to be.

Fenris looks back to Hawke, black brow lifted. _The daughter_ , she mouths, and he nods. Better her than some Tevinter guard, Hawke supposes. Still, to trespass despite Fenris’s threat earlier—she cannot understand it. Fenris rolls his shoulders and turns to square his back against the dresser; to Hawke he gives an apologetic look, then gestures at his own throat. _Scream._

She can do that. She braces one hand on the back of the settee for balance, just in case. Fenris watches her, unreadable.

The scream is rough, short, torn out of her with a hook and quickly stifled in her own wrist. She adds a few false sobs after, wordless pleading into her forearm, and Fenris slams hard enough against the dresser the door rattles.

“Enough,” he snaps, so sudden and loud Hawke jumps, “You see? Run from me again and I will break your legs.”

Hawke gives another sob, appalled to find it not entirely false, and he jerks his head to the door, as if he has just heard the sound of some trespasser beyond it. “What was that?”

A rustling, a patter of feet back down the hallway; then Fenris comes immediately to Hawke, takes her face in both hands. “Are you well?” he asks quietly, knowing she is not.

 _Yes_ , she wants to say, but the tears have at last come in earnest, as if the falsehood had been enough to crack the dam at last, and in the little space between one second and the next her grief swallows her whole. “Fenris,” she gasps instead, and he wraps both arms around her and pulls her so closely to his chest she can hardly breathe.

Hawke cries, then. For the first time in weeks; for the first time as if it might matter, deep bone-shaking sobs that leave her trembling and unsteady. At some point Fenris guides her down to the settee, aware her knees will no longer hold her weight; she buries her face in his chest to muffle the tears she cannot stop. Her throat closes over and over, the knot of fear and rage so long withheld it is stronger now than she can bear; her hands shake, her shoulders heaving like a ship at sea, and only Fenris’s wordless murmurs of comfort keep her from losing what is left of her mind altogether. Her damp hair soaks through his shirt, the high black collar; the lyrium jolts and sparks where she chafes it.

She is so angry. She is _so_ angry, and so tired of being angry, and her back _aches_ , and no matter how she tries to parse it there is no sense to be had in the senseless cruelty.

“Why,” she asks, when she can speak, as if there is an answer to be had. “Why, why—I never hurt them, not _once_ , and still they did such—” She breaks off, horrified. His arms are still so tight they hurt, and one hand clutches into her hair.

“I wish there were an answer,” he breathes. “Hawke, I wish—if there could be a reason beyond selfishness and greed it would be easier. I’m sorry.”

“I keep thinking it won’t hurt anymore—that now you’re here, and it is over—and then all at once it rises all over again, and I can’t—I can’t—”

“Hawke,” he says again, and draws back until he can run his thumb along her cheek. His eyes are so green they burn. “You think grief is a road. You think you can walk the length of the path and look back at the end and say, ‘there, it is finished: I am well.’ Not so.” He kisses one cheek, then the other, and rests his forehead against hers. “Instead it is a shadow. Do you understand? There will be some days where it is almost gone, so faint it is forgotten, and those will be the good days. And there will be others where it falls so sharp before you that every step forward will be an agony, and those will pass by as well. It will never leave you, not in the way that a book may be closed when it is done. But there will come fewer days where the shadows are so stark, and more days where you forget it has happened at all, and somehow you will find a way to move forward despite the fear. Despite the memory.”

Hawke kisses him on the mouth, soft and still, and Fenris shuts his eyes. “I will be with you,” he adds, so quiet she can barely hear it, and she presses her forehead to his in answer.

They sit like this a long time. The rustle at the door does not come again; the fire burns down, finds a new log to spark, and flickers to life again. The sun sets in earnest, leaving little more than a dim purple twilight to glow around the curtains and the soft hush of a distant rain come to break over them at last.

At last the tears slow; at last her breathing steadies. She cannot bring herself to apologize, but she does kiss the corner of Fenris’s mouth once more, and he brushes the back of his hand over her cheek. “All will be well,” he says softly. “I swear it.”

She gives a watery laugh. “You just know I love it when you’re an optimist.”

He smiles at that, and when she demonstrates that she will neither break apart nor weep at his standing, he goes to fetch the food she has almost forgotten. She tugs the quilt from the armchair and wraps it around her shoulders as ward against the twilight coolness, and when Fenris pulls over a small endtable and sets his fine dinner tray upon it, she can’t deny her stomach rumbles. Every cloche removed reveals another mouth-watering dish kept hot by the runed silver: beef so tender it falls apart at her touch, glazed in a fine brown sauce; asparagus with butter and garlic; a cup of onion soup; a fat loaf of brown bread with a dish of cream beside it. The carafe of wine he sets between them, his dark hands graceful as he arranges the plates and the one provided wineglass at her elbow for her pleasure.

She swallows. “Don’t make me eat without you.”

“As you wish,” he says, and brings the plain wood tray originally brought for Hawke as well. Its strips of cold chicken and over-boiled vegetables show poorly against the feast intended for a magister, but between the two meals there is more than enough for both of them, even given Hawke’s starvation. She can’t bear all of the fine food—too rich for a stomach kept to porridge and dirty water for six weeks—but the fact that she is allowed it at all is as much relief as the taste. She works her way slowly through the cold chicken, the bread and cream, the soup; to Fenris she leaves most of the beef and the asparagus. Neither of them reaches for the ruined vegetables from her tray—another luxury, that she may choose not to eat and not starve for it. 

Fenris pours her only a quarter-glass of chilled wine, and that too is for the best. She is exhausted beyond measure, and more than even these few swallows would ruin her; as it is it takes her nearly ten minutes to finish the glass, and when it is empty Fenris presses the cup of water into her hands and makes her drink that, too.

“No more,” she says, and she sets the cup aside when it looks like he might consider forcing her to have another. “It’s enough, I promise. Any more and my eyes will float away.”

“Then you ought to sleep,” he says, though his face softens. He’s tucked one bare foot beneath him in the wooden armchair; now he brings up the other too to sit cross-legged, his dark trousers a blunt contrast to the gold wood. “We must leave early tomorrow.”

 _Oh_ , Hawke thinks, aghast. “How—Fenris, they won’t believe you without the chains.” She’d only just begun to accept her impossible freedom; now it will all be yanked back once more by one more day of deception, of kneeling and casual humiliations and _master_ to the man she loves. It’s one last blighted wound she hadn’t expected, and she can’t stop the angry tears that prickle at the backs of her eyes.

“No. Look at me. Hawke, _look_ at me.” He fishes beneath the quilt to take both her hands in his, squeezes until she’s forced to meet his gaze. “We have watched this inn for two weeks. There will be an hour just after dawn where both the landlord and his daughter are asleep and the only servants awake will be in the kitchens. We will leave then. A horse will be picketed some ways into the woods behind this house; we will take it and ride south, and in less than a half-day’s ride we will meet the others waiting in an inn in the center of Sybaris.”

“The others.”

“Varric, Isabela, and Anders. They have taken rooms there to wait until we arrive.”

“Varric and—" Isabela. _Anders_. “They’re here? In Tevinter?”

“Yes. They came with me as far north as we dared until I had to go on alone. Anders feared you might be injured when we found you and came in case he was needed. Isabela’s ship waits in Ostwick; we will take a tributary of the Minanter as close as possible, then travel the rest of the way to the city on foot. Varric…found you,” he starts, stumbling over some new, unexpected grief, and lapses into silence.

“He wouldn’t have known me from the trade bulletins alone.” Lists only, those, of sex, height, weight, and perfunctory skills. No sketches. No descriptions.

“No. You know how he makes friends everywhere he goes.” A small curve to his mouth, not a smile. “A man in a public house was relating a story he’d heard from a slaver friend of his. About a new slave, an unbroken, difficult Marcher woman, who offered herself to her slaver to protect another young woman in the line.”

Hawke lets out a long, slow breath. “Yes. Well. See what good that did. When we crossed the Acheron she threw herself in all the same.”

“It is a dangerous thing for a slave, to owe a favor.”

“It wasn’t a favor.”

“For those who have nothing, such a kindness can be more painful than the whip.” He presses her fingertips to his lips. “I know you, Hawke. You could not have done less. Her choice was not your fault.”

A terrible lie, and they both know it. “It didn’t even help. When she was dead he took what he wanted from me anyway.”

“Ah, _Hawke_.”

The bitterness is cold, discolored with age. “After the first few times he said he preferred my mouth. He liked me quiet, he said. He enjoyed it when he could see how angry I was.”

Fenris’s eyes are damp, but he doesn’t interrupt. She doesn’t even want to say this aloud, where it might become real; and yet it spills out anyway, a toxic boil lanced and draining against her will. “Talmet was simpler. He just wanted someone to hold still. It wasn’t about the power for him; once he took his pleasure he would leave us alone. But he—Bortas—” and that is the first time she’s said his name aloud in weeks, and the churn of hatred shocks her— “Bortas preferred us to understand exactly how impotent we were. That was what excited him, the moment when we realized he could not be stopped. I fought him in the beginning, and that made it better for him later, when I knew I would die before I won.”

Fenris’s voice, when he manages to speak, is rough with emotion, so tight he must swallow more than once to clear it. “You would have killed him eventually.”

“Yes,” she says flatly. “Somehow. I would have found a way to free myself from whomever bought me and I would have hunted him down like a dog, even if I knew they might kill me after. He _will_ die.”

“Yes,” Fenris says, just as harsh, and then he dips his head to look her in the face. A new determination has risen behind his banked rage. “Hawke. If I ever do something that reminds you of this, that causes you pain, you _must_ tell me.”

“Because that worked _so_ well with you,” she snaps, which is both untrue and crueler than she means to be, but Fenris is unoffended. In fact, he seems almost glad at her anger. “You think I’ll be ready for a tumble by this time next week? You’re sorely mistaken if so.”

“No,” says Fenris placidly, and when shame makes her look away he waits for her to collect herself, to gather in her torn, bleeding edges beneath the quilt’s hem once more. The fire pops in the silence, cheerfully unaware of her despair, and the summer rain outside increases to a heavy drizzle that beats against the windowpanes. Even the twilight has faded into true night, the room dark aside from the gold light thrown by the hearth.

Into the quiet, Hawke says, “I can’t stand the thought that they’ve taken you from me, too.”

“I am _yours_ ,” he tells her instantly, and the sound of it is such a balm to her heart she can hardly breathe. “This they cannot take. You could tell me now that you never want me to touch you again and I would love you still. My place is at your side, whether or not you will have me in your bed.”

She is going to cry again, she can feel it. “I want you with me, Fenris. I do, more than—than anything. I want—to _want_ you. Even on the terrible nights, I put myself to sleep with thoughts of you. I want better memories than these so badly I can taste it, but then I think about the actual—what it would _mean_ , and I—”

“Hush,” he says when the tears begin, and he thumbs them away from her cheek. “It will happen or it will not. It is not a thing that can be forced. Listen to me. Six years, six months, or six days—there is no calendar for this. It will take as long as it takes, and no faster.”

“It had better not take six years,” she says tartly, and sniffs. “Even three was too long the first time.”

One corner of his mouth turns up. “All the same, Hawke, when you want me, I will be here.”

To thank him would only hurt them both. Instead she wipes her nose again, hauls a grin into place, and says, “Well, I do have it on good authority that I have lovely eyes.”

“So,” he agrees, and kisses them both before rising to light the candles. Enough candelabra and sconces have been scattered across the room to give real light, even without mirrors, and by the time he finishes she can better see the dark scabs and shiny purple-green bruises around her wrists, her ankles where she was bound. Fenris sees them himself on his return; in unspoken agreement Hawke makes her unsteady way to the bed, and Fenris meets her there with another box from his luggage, a wire-wrapped case full of ointments, liniment, and bandages.

They sit for a while in a little silence as Fenris cleans and wraps her wrists, then moves to her ankles. Eventually Hawke realizes she has still only heard half the story, and as Fenris tears off a length of cloth with his teeth, she asks, “Who was the slaver’s friend? In the tradehouse?”

“I did not catch his name. Varric would know it. He said his friend was a man called Bortas, that he had a chain of sixty or so slaves in a caravan riding north.”

“We only arrived last night. How did you know where to go?”

“I knew they would try to sell at Cytates. There is no other southern market large enough and corrupt enough to sell freemen without papers. I have been at that auction from dawn to dusk for the last four days.”

She can’t bear the thought of it. Fenris, who hates slavery more than anything, forced to stand there hours on end while good people, innocents, were sent to torture and servitude and death. “Fenris, I’m sorry.”

“No, Hawke.” Very gentle; very firm. “Don’t apologize for that.”

“All right,” she says wretchedly, and reaches for him instead. The kiss is short, colored with sorrow, and when it is over Fenris shudders against her mouth. “I do,” she whispers without drawing back. “Want you to touch me, I mean. I didn’t think I would, but this—of all the food, the bath, all of this…” she waves a hand meaninglessly, then threads her fingers through his in her lap. His dark skin is a stark contrast to her own, the lyrium shimmering for just a moment as he tightens his grip. “This is the only thing that’s mattered.”

“I confess I’m glad to hear it.” He brushes his lips over her knuckles, and for the first time Hawke realizes how much it might mean to him, too, that she is within reach at last. “Here. Turn down the covers. I will watch a little longer.”

“Yes, but—sleep with me tonight. Beside me. Don’t smirk at me, you handsome thing. You know what I mean.”

The chuckle is rusty but real, the first time she has made him laugh since he bought her in a Cytates street. “I do, Hawke.”

She leans back, satisfied, and shimmies her way beneath three layers of sheet, duvet, and quilt. The pile of pillows at her back is too many; she tosses three of them to the floor beside the bed, then settles in to watch Fenris putter. He hangs her wet towel in the bathing room and drains the last of the bathwater, releasing one last waft of oranges and cardamom; he strips and bathes himself, a quick soap and a rinse from the buckets of now-cold water she’d almost forgotten. He changes after to the sleeping clothes he prefers when they travel, a red open-collared tunic and tan leggings fitted so tightly they cannot chafe the lyrium; when that is finished he gathers their dropped clothing and folds it all once more, tucking them into his suitcase. Her chains he pools into a neat pile, then reaches for his shoulder bag, the leather one she’d given him for Satinalia. He doesn’t quite hesitate when he opens the catch, but she sees him steel himself for her response.

Another set of chains rests at the top of the bag, clearly visible from her vantage point. Plain iron manacles, black interlocked links stretched between them. A collar, too, also black iron, which disappears as he adds her brass ones atop them and clips the leather flap shut once more. He stays a moment, looking at the bag between his knees, then turns to face her.

“We did not know what subterfuge would be necessary,” he says plainly. “I would not have used them unless I had no choice.”

“Were they yours?”

“No. The originals were lost in Seheron. These are only an imitation.”

“Almost yours.”

“Almost,” he allows, but pushes the sack back with the rest of the luggage. “Regardless, they will remain unused.”

“Come to bed, then.”

“Soon,” he says, softening, and he puts out a few of the candles before checking the door and window one more time. Then—at last—he comes to sit beside her on his side of the bed where he belongs, his weight dipping the mattress exactly as it should. He doesn’t yet get beneath the covers, leaning instead against the headboard for his watch; but it is good enough for what she wants, and Hawke wraps her arms around his very solid waist and pillows her head against his stomach. Her back strains at the motion, but she doesn’t care.

He is so warm. Soft, too, even through the planes of muscle, and smelling faintly of sandalwood, and at her approving mumble he begins to stroke through her damp hair, long and slow to the very tips and back again. Every once in a while he brushes against the brass collar just long enough to remind them both it is still there; then it fades and is forgotten once more.

The candles burn down their wicks and wink out, one by one; the fire pops and cracks, dimmer than it was, and smolders quietly in the hearth. The steady rain outside the window continues in a calming, susurrant rush.

“I will wake you at dawn,” Fenris says softly. “Sleep, Hawke. As long as you can.”

He knows what waits for her in the Fade, knows his presence may only do so much. Still—

This morning she was a slave, bought and sold like other slaves. Now she is in the arms of the man she loves, safe, fed, clean, and in almost no pain. Save the brass collar she is free.

All things considered, she’s had worse days. Fenris whispers a goodnight above her, and in the space of three breaths she is asleep.

—

The nightmare wakes her just after second bell.

It’s honestly longer than she thought she’d be given, and Hawke stares up at the frescoed ceiling in the dark, willing her heart to slow. The vestiges are already vanishing, Bortas’s whip knotted around her throat, his booted foot on the back of her knee; she wipes the sweat from her forehead, shakes it off with the last of the fear. The rain has stopped at last, and silent moonlight has edged around the drawn curtains, lilting the ceiling’s painted figures in cool grey light. Beside her Fenris stirs, mumbles her name. She smooths the back of his hand where it lies across her waist, but that seems to startle him more than anything, and he jolts awake with wide eyes gone a luminescent green in the dark. “ _Hawke—_ ”

“I’m here,” she murmurs, unwilling to break the night. “Just a dream.”

“A dream,” he echoes raggedly, and swipes across his eyes. “A dream. You are here. That is real.”

“Mm.” She presses a tired kiss to his jaw, then pushes back the covers. “No, don’t get up. I just want a little water.”

“Can you stand?”

“Yes. I feel better already.” And she does, honestly; the liberal elfroot in his salves has worked quickly, and though her back is sore as flames and her bruises still too tender, she does not doubt her feet will hold her. “Go back to sleep.”

He does not—not that she’d particularly expected it—but he does consent to observe from the bed without rising. Half his face is buried in the pillow once more—she really can only see one glowing green eye—and he sleepily watches her fetch a cup of water from the ewer, drain it twice, and go to the windowsill still hidden by its heavy curtain.

Neither does he protest when she pulls the curtain back, just enough to see the wild-grown woods that come to the very edge of the courtyard below. The storm has finished and passed on, leaving a full moon and a cloudless night; the olive trees glow beautifully in the dark, and if she cranes her head just so a thousand stars spatter their way across the black sky. Purple wisteria drips from overgrown trellises around their window, and when a breeze picks up the blossoms dance as if in silent song.

A narrow, cushioned seat has been set in the wainscoting just below the window; Hawke takes it on a whim, draws her knees to her chin, and follows the moon a little longer. Fenris still lies awake, watching her—she can hear him breathe—but he lets her be, and she loves him for it.

“Still some way to dawn,” she says at last, low, to keep the spell alive. The moon has shifted, though not by much; the stars remain patient and unmoved.

“Four hours,” he answers. His voice is rough with sleep, and she wonders how little he’s had the last few days, waiting for her. “Three and a half, perhaps. You will want the rest.”

He’s right, of course, and without much protest Hawke begins to slip from the window-seat. Or—she would, except the window behind her abruptly creaks open and—

A hand has wrapped around her right wrist.

It’s so nonsensical she can only stare. Medium olive-toned skin, long almond-shaped nails digging in just above her white-wrapped bandages; and a wrist, attached to an arm that leads out the window—forced from the outside, she now sees—to a pair of wide black eyes just peeking over the sill, framed in wisteria.

The innkeeper’s daughter. The man’s _daughter_ , clinging to a trellis outside her window, and a harsh, frightened whisper: “Come on, come on, quick! Quick, before he wakes up!”

“ _What?_ ” Hawke gasps, flabbergasted, and the girl begins to yank—

Fenris explodes from the bed. Silent as a panther and twice as fast, he’s there like an arrowshot, reaching around Hawke to haul the girl bodily into the room. Her knee cracks hard on the windowsill; two of the diamond-shaped panes in the iron-framed window shatter in the struggle. Hawke’s barely even had time to blink—

Fenris’ hand over the girl’s mouth, wrapped tight from behind. The lyrium bright as day, all signs of sleep vanished, his other hand crooked and cruel and burning with rage—the daughter wild-eyed and white with terror, scrabbling uselessly at Fenris’s forearm—

“Wait,” Hawke chokes, then, louder— “Wait. Fe— _wait_!”

His hand freezes mid-descent. The lyrium pulses with his heartbeat, lighting the girl’s face from below. “What is it?” he snarls without looking at Hawke. “She must die. _Now_.”

“Wait.” Hawke circles the broken glass on the floor, the desk chair overturned. It will be a miracle if no one woke. But now, first— “Say that again, please. Just now—what did you say?”

Fenris’s hand over her mouth loosens the most infinitesimal amount, but she still doesn’t speak. Her dark eyes dart from Hawke to Fenris and back again, the whites showing all the way around.

Hawke steps closer. “Before he wakes up, you said.” _Dusana_ , that’s her name. “Dusana. ‘Before he wakes up.’ You came to—didn’t you? You came here to rescue me.”

Dusana shakes her head violently, but even Fenris can see she’s lying. “I _will_ kill you if you scream,” he warns, and eases his hand from her mouth.

She does not scream, but her eyes darting frantically from the door to the window and back again remind Hawke of nothing so much as a cornered rat. “I don’t—I don’t know, magister. I don’t know. An accident, I’m sure.” A babble: senseless, terrified. “I saw a light on from the yard, thought maybe a candle had been left burning—we might have caught fire and burned to the ground, lord—”

“No candles were lit, and the curtains were drawn.”

“I don’t—lord, I don’t—”

“She’s frightened,” Hawke says reprovingly, and when Fenris scoffs she approaches as she would a stray, hands out, voice low and warm. “It’s all right. We won’t hurt you.”

Fenris snorts again. Hawke ignores him. Dusana, though, flicks again between their faces; whatever she sees seems to worsen it a thousandfold, and she sinks to her knees on the woven rug.

“It is a trick,” she moans, and buries her face in her hands. “You heard—you _knew_ , and you came to trick me. Maker, oh, Maker—” and she bursts into a torrent of Tevene Hawke has no hope of following.

Fenris’s lip curls, but he does not correct her as he looks to Hawke. They have a brief, wordless argument, which Hawke wins, and he huffs, crossing to lean back against the dresser still blocking the door. He folds his arms, seriously displeased.

 _Reckless_ , he calls her with his eyes, his tense shoulders, the twist of his full lips: a shout in everything but words. She doesn’t care. She’s glad to feel reckless again. “Dusana,” she says instead. “Please stop.”

“You’re no slave. No chains—I see how you stand now. No shift, no chains, and your master an elf. You’re no slave.” The last word drags off into another moan, and the girl presses the heels of her hands to her eyes. An instant later she tears them away, though her lips tremble with fear. “I won’t tell you. Not how many, or where—I won’t. Flay off my skin in the arena if you want.”

“I emphatically do not want to do that.” Hawke’s knees tremble from sustained effort, and before they can give out altogether she rights the upturned writing chair and takes a seat before the still-kneeling woman. “Besides, on the contrary, Dusana. Until noon today, I was a slave in every sense of the word, chained and driven in a caravan for the last six weeks until we reached your city’s markets.”

Dusana stares at Hawke’s upturned wrists, bruised and scarred even around the wrappings. “Noon today? I don’t…”

“Yes. When I was purchased by this man who happens to be my lover.”

“Freed,” Fenris snaps, then turns away.

“Freed,” Hawke allows. “Regardless, my lover is no landholding Tevinter citizen, despite his exceedingly intimate familiarity with your country, and so a deception was necessary. I will say neither of us accounted for running into the one innkeeper’s daughter in the city who apparently rescues slaves in her free time.”

“They would do worse than flay you,” Fenris says sharply. “If they found you stealing chattel they would stake you to the earth with honey and let the insects and rodents eat you alive. Your family would be tortured and destroyed. The inn would be burned to the ground, and all who ever stayed here hunted down and garroted.”

“I—I know.”

“Does your father?”

“I’m—not sure. I think so. We’ve never spoken of it, but…sometimes he makes an excuse to be in the kitchens or the yard to avoid the main room, if I need it, and he has never worried overmuch when the slaves are discovered escaped in the morning.”

“How many?”

Her dark eyes flash. “I won’t tell you that, Dimonidus of Carastes.”

“Fine. Then I will tell you this: if it is more than five in the last year they already know, and whether you expect it or not they will drop upon you like a carrion horde and leave nothing but bones behind.”

Now she pales, wrings her hands at her throat. Hawke makes a gesture she means to be gentle; Dusana flinches instead and looks to the floor before answering. “You would—you would have been the fourth.”

Fenris makes a sharp, disgusted sound. “The girl is as foolish as you.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Hawke leans forward to the edge of her chair, her back aching as she rests her elbows on her knees. “So you have a choice, Dusana. You can try to raise the house if you like. Fenris will kill you quickly, but you may be able to scream before you die. We will have to run immediately, which I would not enjoy, and hope they are too confused and horrified by your body to give us enough time to disappear. Or—” and she tries not to soften, but the girl’s lips quiver, “—you say nothing and return to your bed, and we return to ours, and when you find us missing in the morning you are as confused and angry as everyone else that the arrogant magister has underpaid your father and vanished.”

Dusana wipes her eyes. Her long black braid has come loose, tendrils spiraling around her face. “I hate this,” she says. Her voice shakes. “I hate what you have done. You came—you came into this house, play-acting at slavery, and made me believe you would be tortured in this room. I pitied you. I have spent all day thinking of your suffering, and I was willing to risk—to risk _everything_ , and all this time it was only pretense.”

“You would prefer I were really a slave?” Hawke asks, stung. “That he were raping me in here instead of rescuing me?”

She jerks forward. “ _No_!” she almost shouts, aghast. “No! No! Of course not. Of _course_ not. I’m sorry.” She lowers her eyes, and a tear drips to the rug. “I’m sorry. That was unkind of me. Selfish.”

“It’s all right.” The flash of anger is gone as swiftly as it came; now Hawke is only tired. “I’m sorry for the deception. I am, truly. I’m sorry you were hurt in the lie. But if he had been kind to me in any way, in any other place than this, we would have been discovered. We would have been separated and sold again, and there is not a river in the world large enough to wash away the blood I would spill to keep him free.”

Dusana sucks in a quick breath, and Hawke chances a glance at Fenris. He’s watching her from the door still, his eyes shining with a mix of gladness and grief, and at her look he gives her one quick nod. _The same for you_.

“Of course,” Dusana whispers. “Of course. I’m sorry. It must have been very hard…”

“It was, but that will pass. What we need to know now, Dusana, is what you will do with this information.”

“I will keep it a secret. Of course I will.” She wipes her eyes again, but her chin has stopped trembling. “I’ll go out the window, back the way I came. No one will even know I have left my room.”

Fenris shifts his shoulders. “We cannot trust her.”

“He’s not wrong,” Hawke admits, and slowly, gracelessly, she slips to kneel on the floor beside the innkeeper’s daughter. “I hate that we need to ask, but can you give any assurance that you will keep your word?”

“Yes.” Her hands go to the back of her neck, tangling the braid even further, and then she holds forth a necklace: a delicate silver chain, a silver pendant inscribed with a Tevene character, and a looped oval pearl. “This belonged to my mother. Keep this. Leave it somewhere in this room when you go, and I’ll find it tomorrow.”

Hawke looks to Fenris; he hesitates, then nods again, though his jaw is still tight. The chain makes a little silver pool in Hawke’s open palm. “I’ll leave it under the washbasin,” Hawke says. “We will be gone by dawn, but the longer you can give us afterwards the better.”

“I will.” Now her shoulders square themselves, her back drawn straight. “I will do this for you. It may only be a few hours, but I will keep out the servants as long as I can.”

“Thank you, Dusana.”

“I didn’t mean it before. Now I do. You are welcome in this house.” She looks up. “Both of you.”

Abruptly exhausted, Hawke cannot rise from the floor on her own—her just desserts for empathizing with a Tevinter, she thinks vaguely—and Fenris must come pull her to her feet. Dusana he helps up too, though less carefully, and she picks her way to the window through the broken glass still embedded in the rug. She waves off Hawke’s apology, though Hawke makes a mental note to leave some coin for the new panes, and more dexterously than Hawke had guessed possible is swiftly out the window once more, the rain-soaked trellis outside as sure a path for her feet as an open road.

“Thank you,” Hawke says again, just before Dusana’s dark eyes disappear below the window’s frame.

She pauses, glances back, and smiles. It is a lovely smile. “Travel safely,” she whispers, and she is gone.

They are quiet a long time, after. Eventually Fenris crosses to close the window and latch it once more; Hawke steps with care back to the bed, the covers upturned and half on the floor from Fenris’s earlier flight. To right them again is the limit of her ability, but it is a satisfying effort, and within a few moments she has climbed beneath the heavy duvet for the last time.

Fenris does not immediately join her, as expected. Instead he watches from the window and tells her as Dusana clambers down the trellis, flits across the courtyard, and disappears into a dark side door. He does not comment on Hawke’s recklessness, though she knows he certainly thinks it, and at last, some minutes later, he comes and slips into the bed beside her, his back set to the headboard, though his eyes stay trained on the door and she knows his pointed ears listen for a step in the hall beyond.

“You won’t sleep again, will you?” Hawke asks quietly. Unconsciousness has already caught her edges like hooks in a cloak’s hem, and even if she wished she would not be able to fight it much longer.

“No,” he admits. “Not here. Not after such a thing.” He’s quiet a long time, then adds, “It is it too close to certain memories.”

“A shadow with sharp edges,” Hawke agrees, and Fenris snorts.

Still, he’s smiling as she tucks her forehead against his hip where he sits. “Just so. For now I will watch. Close your eyes.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” she mumbles, already drifting, and by the time his hand resettles on her shoulder she is asleep.

—


	3. Chapter 3

a series of epilogues

—

1.

Just after dawn, two servants gathering eggs from the henhouse are startled by a tremor in the earth. At first, only a few pebbles knock here and there against the roosts; then the quake begins in earnest and the chickens scatter, squawking angrily, in a blur of feathers and wings. The servants abandon the eggs to race outside, fearful the rickety henhouse will collapse, and skid to a stop, because what is outside is more impossible still.

A pillar of light has exploded out of the forest. The source is deep in the woods, distant enough that they can see no root, but it bursts in a white, impossible line into the belly of young morning clouds still pink with dawn. The clouds storm where the light impacts, lightning arcing in quick, bright bursts through incongruously thin white wisps, and then, as swiftly as it began, it is over. The light winks out into nothing; the sky claps with one last loud boom of thunder, and the earth grows still.

By the time the servants have blinked the afterimages from their eyes, windows have begun to crack open from the inn behind them, household and guests alike peering out in sleepy curiosity. The innkeeper emerges not long after, his apron untied and his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, and the two servants explain in breathless excitement what they have seen. A third, more sensible, wrangles the escaped chickens back into their henhouse and secures the door properly this time. No one notices that the fine suite on the second floor remains shut tight, that the curtains do not even flutter with a breath of motion inside.

Afterwards, the two servants lead the way deep into the woods to the place where the pillar emerged. It takes some doing between crossed memories and the half-dozen or so excitable onlookers trailing after, but eventually the party comes across a hitherto undiscovered hole in the middle of the forest. More than a hole: a crater, surrounded by broken, blasted trees. It stretches thirty feet from side to side, perfectly round and perfectly deep to another fifteen feet, save a single column of earth left standing to ground level in its very center. The column is straight-edged, so perfectly cut that sheared rockfaces sit exposed within the dirt, and at the top a little patch of grass heralds the forest floor of which it had once been a part. Still green, the grass, though mashed flat by whatever force has been unleashed here.

Just wide enough to hold two people, one servant muses aloud, so long as they stood very close together…

One of the guests discovers footsteps on the far side of the crater. Two sets indeed, two pairs of booted feet leading up the slick, torn earth; here and there, skid marks show where their owners had slipped backwards at least once before successfully clambering over the crater’s lip. No other tracks are discovered, however, once the boot-marks cross into the softer grass around the crater, and in the fruitless search of the surrounding broken trees, none see the innkeeper’s daughter pluck a small bit of gold from the base of the earthy pillar before hiding it in her pocket: a slave’s brass collar, torn and twisted, the chain broken beyond repair.

Later, it will end up in the pig's pen, each link carefully separated from the rest and the plate hammered flat. Later, much later, one of the servants will at last discover the magister in the second-floor room has fled with his slave, and the innkeeper's daughter will quietly retrieve a necklace and a little stack of gold from beneath the room's washbasin. Later, the innkeeper will sigh and groan and in the end decide the imperial guard would not, alas, be worth the trouble. 

Later, a black horse with two cloaked riders will pass out of the trees onto the main path and turn south, the noon sun and a cool breeze at their backs, following the long and quiet road that will carry them out of Tevinter at last.

—

2.

_To my very esteemed colleague, Bortas of Dexteri,_

_I write with bad news. You do not know me, but I discovered from his records that you worked closely with my brother Talmet. It is with the greatest sorrow I must inform you Talmet has died. Indeed—it is hard for me to say—he has been murdered by some unknown assailant. They found him in his home in Neromenian last week. Most of him._

_I write because Talmet, though a good man in many ways, Maker keep him, has left a number of considerable debts behind. Indeed, his collectors knock on our doors daily now that the loans have come due. As his partner of many years, who knows best the books he helped you keep, I write to ask for your assistance—_

Bortas crumples the letter in his fist. The words are the same the fourth time as the first, delivered not an hour ago by an impatient courier who’d leapt back upon his horse and departed immediately, not caring for the enormous inconvenience he had so blithely delivered.

Talmet dead. It _is_ inconvenient, even if he ignores the nonsense about assisting with his debts. Talmet had always been reliable, trustworthy, well-possessed of the cruel streak necessary for their particular line of work. They had worked well together. Eight years their partnership had lasted, unusually long, until now. If he had come on this job as Bortas had suggested—

But—no. Bortas stands, throws open the tent flap to peer out into the night beyond. A noise, perhaps? _No_ , only nerves, shaken as he is by Talmet’s death. The twenty or so slaves still lie in their lines, the long chain that runs between all of them staked deep to the grassy earth every ten feet. The far slaves are only huddles in the dark, unlit by the few firepits he keeps hot for the guards’ comfort; the four covered wagons, now empty for the night, stand backdrop to the silent lot. The picketed horses have bent their necks atop each other, quietly asleep.

The guards must be out patrolling the plains. There is nothing around them, not for miles, save a flat broad river that flows north beside them, but even so. “Should have left at least one of the five behind,” he says out loud, annoyed. Then—a flash of moonlight off a pauldron, a shadow emerging from behind one of the wagons. A gauntleted hand lifts, waves, dispelling any alarm.

“Good.” _Good_ , one sole piece of good news in an aggravatingly bad day. At least he is not wholly surrounded by incompetents.

He lets the fabric fall shut as he turns back inside. Not the proper tent he prefers to travel with, full-sized, with the collapsible writing desk and the raised, tick-mattress cot, but with this smaller job and fewer hands to serve, he hadn’t seen the practicality. Besides, the pile of furs is easier to warm than a cot, given the right company, and with Talmet gone he had planned on indulging himself more than usual.

Talmet gone. Talmet gone _permanently_ , and Bortas sinks down onto the three-legged stool with a groan. The little pile of candles at his feet gutters in a sudden breeze, nearly winks out, and steadies again. Bortas toes one of the wax pillars idly with his boot, then goes very, very still.

In—a _breeze_ —?

—

The sheer, dumb confusion on Bortas’s face when he turns to see her standing in his tent is almost—almost— _almost_ worth it. He wipes it away soon enough, but even the annoyed disinterest he pulls down like a mask isn’t enough to erase her memory.

“Good evening,” Bortas drawls, and stretches his legs out to cross at the ankles. The long black tail of his hair falls smoothly over one shoulder. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

He doesn’t recognize her.

Hawke's breath catches. He doesn’t recognize her. After all this, after the weeks of torture and three solid months of nightmares, he doesn’t even remember her face. Maker’s blood and bone but she _hates_ him, she _hates him_. She puts one hand to her stomach, sickened.

Now his eyes light with memory. Of course. “Ahhh,” he says, drawing out the word, and the corners of his mouth curl up in that soft, smug smile. “Can it be? My little Caerula, come home to me after all this time?”

Focus. The dirt beneath her feet; the hard black grain of Merrill’s borrowed staff in her gripped fingers; the magic singing like a stream in her blood, as strong as it’s ever been.

“I think,” Hawke says, her voice even, “that you will never call me that name again.”

“No? Will you stop me this time, Caerula? As you did all the other times before?” He laughs, a smooth, low chuckle. His gold teeth sparkle in the candlelight. “Oh, Caerula. Poor, sweet girl. Will you _ever_ learn?”

His head snaps to the side at the staff’s blow. He’s knocked from the stool to his elbow, cheek already purpling; Hawke returns the butt of the staff to the dirt at her feet, unmoved. “I’ve been told I pick things up quick enough.”

“You struck me.” Appalled, one hand cupped gingerly over a cheekbone that must be cracked. “You—how _dare_ you. Guards! Guards, to me!”

Hawke shifts her weight to one side. “Call them again, Bortas.”

“What?”

“An order, from me to you.” She lifts an eyebrow. “Call your guards again.”

He sneers, and when he jerks to his feet and darts around her through the tent flap she does not stop him. She follows him out into the night, unhurried. “ _Guards!_ ” he shouts again. “Costor! Pollux! Where— _augh!_ ”

Fenris heaves the heartless body of the last guard from his shoulder to the pile, and Bortas recoils back into Hawke’s hand, palm outstretched to stop him. Blood gleams across the broken armor, caught sticky and orange-edged in the glittering coals from the nearest firepit. All five. All five, in the few minutes since she left him to enter Bortas’s tent. Fenris looks up at her as he straightens, his eyes glowing green in the reflected firelight, his familiar articulated gauntlets bloody to the elbows. Ah, how she loves him.

His mouth takes on a faint, unamused curve. She smiles herself, then leans forward to Bortas’s ear. “Ah, Bortas,” she says softly. “Alas, they’re all dead.”

“Don’t touch me,” he snarls, tearing away from her hand. “Who do you think you are, girl?”

The slaves are awake, now, some pushing awkwardly up from sleep, others crouched in fear where their chains remain staked to the earth. Most have eyes that gleam green as cats’ in the dark. All watching—all silent—

“I’m no one at all,” Hawke says. “Get the stool from the tent and bring it here for me.”

“Fuck you, cunt.”

The fire comes swiftly, easily, like calling her name. She lets him watch the slow-rolling flame drip down her fingers like oil, white-hot, and then, as realization dawns in his eyes and before he can scramble away, she wraps her burning hand around his throat.

He tries to scream, can’t, tears at her forearm with his nails. That pain is incidental, even where he can reach bare skin above her heavy leather bracers; his knees buckle and she bends to follow after. She lets him flail a moment or two longer until the stink of burning flesh fills her nose, then drops him and the fire at the same time.

He kneels at her feet, bent over himself, his breaths ragged and whistling. With his hair fallen out of the way she can see the furious red of her own fingerprints curled around the back of his neck, the flesh blanched white on the surround. A bad sign for healing, she thinks. It will most certainly scar.

“Bortas,” she says. “Go into the tent and bring out the stool.”

He’s sobbing from the pain, his lips twisted in hatred, but he staggers to his feet, his throat smoking, and with jerky steps makes his way to the tent. Fenris follows in silence, solicitously lifts the flap for him while he fetches the stool, and follows him back again to the place where Hawke waits.

“Put it down,” she tells him, and then, “Sit.”

It is a low stool, three-legged, and Bortas is forced to look up at her. He heaves for air, his jaw quivering; several strands of black hair have fallen from his smooth tail to tangle around his face. The slaves around them are quiet as the grave.

Hawke is content to watch him in silence, studying the face that has haunted her every waking hour for months; Bortas, it seems, cannot bear it as easily. “Well?” he snaps. “ _Well_?”

“I find your tone disrespectful, Bortas.”

“I’ll break you in half, bitch.”

“No, I don’t think you will. I’ve come, Bortas, for your apology. For your tone just now, and for the horrors you have brought down on your slaves for years. You may surmise which offense I find more serious.”

He laughs, unhinged in agony. “My _apology_. Poor Caerula, hm? I see your master has come with you. How _persuasive_ you must have been. Did you have to bounce on his cock like you did mine, or did you suck him like the whore you are to get him here?” He drops his head, hiding for a moment the terrible burn on his throat, then looks up at her, his eyes glittering. “I hope you cried from the rage when he fucked you. I hope we’ve shared that joy.”

Fenris is stiff as iron behind him, his arms folded so tightly the muscles in his throat jump, and the lyrium ripples in little bursts. Easier, somehow, to keep her temper in check when she knows he is so angry on her behalf. “Do you know, I think I’ll also take an apology for that?”

“I won’t beg to you.”

“I think,” Hawke says mildly, “that you will.”

She is not entirely a stranger to torture. She’s inflicted pain before to keep men talking, to frighten their fellows into revealing where slaves were kept to be sold, where captured mages were hidden away. She’s dealt bad deaths in the face of injustice, when to kill cleanly would be too kind a repayment for unchecked brutality; but even those lingered only a few minutes before dying. She and Fenris had discussed only up to this moment, no more. He had not asked; she could not have answered if he had.

She could do it, she realizes. It is a hard, stark look at her own self, laid bare across this slave-choked Tevinter plain, but she finds she has the stomach for real torture after all. An unpleasant relief.

Fenris meets her eyes and goes to fetch the bag from his horse. The mare already dozes with the rest, uninterested in the unfolding scene behind her; Fenris returns within moments and throws the bag’s contents to the dirt at Bortas’s feet.

“Put them on,” Hawke says. “I’m sure you know how they work.”

Two sets of brass manacles, only a handspan of chain between them. A thicker chain for the waist, a ring at the navel for the wrists’ links to lock. No collar, though. That is long gone, and Hawke does not care. They will not need it for him.

“How poetic,” Bortas sneers, and in a flash of dirt and torn red robe he is gone.

Hawke barely even has to move. Her staff sweeps down in a wide arc; ice bursts from the earth in eight-foot spears, driving Bortas back a half-dozen steps before he manages to swivel and try another direction. She pulls up the earth in a rocky wall there—not nearly so solid as Merrill’s, but enough to keep him back—and when he turns on Hawke herself, wild-eyed and screaming as he yanks a dagger from his belt, she lifts her empty hand and clenches her fist. A few of the watching slaves cry out.

Bortas jerks into the air, suspended against the night-dark sky as if on puppet strings. His hair floats loose behind him, the tail’s tie all but gone; his fine Tevinter robes spread like wings to either side. He opens his mouth to scream—

Hawke slams him to the earth. And again, and once more, until he stops trying to rise and cannot even catch his breath to curse her. Fenris has not moved.

“Bortas,” she says into the silence, broken only by the rattling of little pebbles as they fall, “come sit on this stool, and put on these manacles. Will you make me ask again?”

_Oh, but will you make me ask again, Caerula?_

He spits something at her, unintelligible between the hatred and the broken gold teeth, but he crawls and staggers to the stool and sits, and with shaking hands, fastens the manacles around his own ankles, his own waist, his wrists. “There,” he spits with a spray of blood. “Satisfied?” They can all hear the _bitch_ at the end of it, but Hawke chooses to let it pass.

“Yes. Thank you.” She rocks to her toes, settles her staff a little more securely at her side. “Now. I find myself wondering what we should do with you. Tevinter executions are fantastically imaginative; I confess I have been dreaming of all the ways to kill you for some time. However, I find I have no crucifix, no ants or honey, and no patience, so we must find something else more expedient than the Archon’s justice.”

“You won’t get away with this. Slave trash. When I tell the imperial guard what you’ve done they’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”

“Flames and pyre,” Hawke says, surprised. “When did I give you the impression you will leave this place alive?”

Bortas recoils. Tries again to touch his throat, obviously pained by the sharp gesture, but is throttled by the too-short chains at his waist. “You will kill a man in cold blood. A man chained, at your mercy.”

“I am a man-killer, Bortas. You named me so, before hundreds of people. The only reason you took me alive at the start was that your ambushing man near cracked my skull before I could burn you to ash. I castrated Talmet,” she adds, and watches Bortas blanch. “I also removed both feet and both hands and scattered the bits across his various offices. Your offices too, I assume.” All pieces removed post-mortem, though he doesn’t need to know that. “You are going to be very dead very soon, Bortas, and there is no one here to save you.”

“You killed Talmet.” Like a child, stupidly echoing something it does not understand.

“Yes.”

“You are going to kill me.”

“Oh, yes. Very much so.”

“I don’t want to die.”

Hawke laughs. Bortas flinches; she leans closer, stops just short of taking his chin in her hand. Even after this, she can’t bear to touch him. “Will you beg now?” she asks, curious.

He will. He slides from the stool, white-faced save his brilliantly purple cheekbone, and begs on his knees for her mercy. When she does not speak he throws himself into full prostration, his forehead digging into the dirt, his chained hands outstretched, palm-up, for her pity; he babbles in Tevene and trade alike, empty oaths to make amends, to give up the trade and buy a farm in the hinterlands, to seek out all those he has sold and beg their forgiveness alongside her own. Nonsense jabbering, moon promises.

He breaks off, sobbing. He gasps, “Please, please, I don’t want to die.”

“Bortas, you of all people ought to know sometimes we don’t get what we want.” She crouches down beside him, elbows resting on her knees. “It seems you too fear death more than the wounding of your pride.”

The firepit pops as a coal breaks, sending a little shower of sparks into the air. It flashes along the lines of the brass manacles, trembles on his filthy tears. “I’ll call you master, if you wish. You can use me however you want, as long as you want. The elf can fuck me until I bleed.”

Fenris makes a sound of disgust, revolted. Hawke says impatiently, “That you think yourself any kind of prize worth offering to me, Bortas, is proof enough you still have no idea what you are. The only thing I wish to do to your cock is cut it off.”

The marks on his neck stand dark against the rest of his skin. “People depend on me. I have workers—I have clerical staff, bookkeepers, guardsmen. Without me they’ll—I—”

“Yes, I considered them. I found their employment an inadequate reason to spare your life.”

“ _Please_ ,” he moans.

Hawke looks down at him for a long time. This creature from her nightmares, the Tevinter slaver with his smooth black hair and his smug smile: his gold-capped teeth broken and his cheek broken and his arrogance shattered at her feet. There is satisfaction in the sight of it, a cold vindictiveness that he has fallen so low; but the rest is unexpectedly hollow, even through the hate. An emptiness that rattles, like a little finger-bone tumbling down a well.

She will kill him, here, tonight, and in the end he will be nothing more than another dead man in her wake. Even now she can sense it will bring no relief in the doing.

She lifts her eyes to find Fenris watching her. An echo rises of an old conversation, where the roles were reversed and she hadn’t yet known how poisonous the hate could truly be. _Yes, I am free. Danarius is dead. Yet…it doesn’t feel like it should_.

Fenris gives a short, sharp nod, and Hawke lifts her chin. _So be it._

“Fine,” she says, and Bortas’s crying goes muffled all at once, as if she’d put a pillow over his face. “I will give you one chance.”

He lifts his head, eyes wet. “How? How?”

She ignores him, pushes up to her feet at last, and strides over to the place in the grass where the slaves’ line begins, the long chains staked deep to the earth where twenty or so bodies remain bound. In mangled Tevene, she says, “Here is his chance. Is there anyone here who would speak on this man’s behalf? Anyone who would have his life spared?”

“ _What_?” cries Bortas behind her. “What—but they’re—you can’t ask them! They don’t know—you can’t—”

Hawke glances over her shoulder, and Fenris plants one heavy foot on the back of Bortas’s neck, pushing his face back down the ground. She turns back to the slaves. They’re all watching her, oppressively silent.

“Anyone,” she says, and crosses her arms. “Even a single voice will stop me. Either way you will be freed. I leave his life in your hands.”

“ _Kill him_ ,” a voice hisses. A woman on her knees, a little older, auburn hair chopped short to her pointed ears. Her brown eyes rage with hatred. “Kill him now, shem. Burn him alive.”

“I want him dead.” Another woman, pretty, with a black eye and bruises on her throat. “Please. Please make him stop.”

“Don’t let him live.”

“You don’t know what he’s done.”

“He’ll kill us. He’ll kill us, please.”

“You haven’t heard them screaming through the night. You don’t know—you don’t know—”

Hawke knows. So does Bortas, his lips white with fear as she faces him for the last time, the whispers of slaves at her back.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes, the whites showing all around his eyes. “Please, please, Caerula, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Caerula, mercy.”

A selfish apology, meaningless, driven only by fear of death. It is still the most sincere she has ever seen him.

“Goodbye, Bortas,” she says, and thumps her staff into the earth.

The lightning explodes out of him like a bomb. He burns bright as a sun, the air so acrid with ozone all the hairs on her arms stand up on end and her teeth ache. Blue-white light pours from his screaming mouth in long, crackled streaks; Fenris watches grimly, his face lit from below in weird, strobing flashes gone to darkness as swiftly as they come.

Bortas screams only once, a short thing of terrible agony. His head rocks back on his neck, his arms spasming violently against the chains; sparks jump between the links, between his teeth. It takes only a few seconds for him to die.

The light burns a little longer, and then Hawke lets the lightning go. It fizzles up into the night sky, fleeting as the sparks that dance from the firepit. Bortas’s body slumps forward, then topples onto its side; his eyes stare into nothing, glassy and empty. Hawke leans on her staff and looks at him.

Good that he is dead. Less good, as it happens, that she spent so much energy to kill him so quickly. Just under three months have passed since she was first taken, a little over a month since her magic was returned to her, and she is not quite so recovered that she can loose such magic and not feel the backbite after.

It is so _good_ that he is dead.

Fenris’s hand comes beneath her elbow, surreptitiously supporting her weight, and she leans into him with open gratitude. He doesn’t even flinch when the lyrium glows at her touch; she is too tired to control herself, and as if it senses where her magic ought to be its power runs towards her, downstream, like water. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know what I was going to do until I did it.”

He shakes his head, leans his temple briefly against hers. “All that matters is that he is dead. Come. We should find the keys.”

She knows he can feel her trembling, can sense the rising scream at the back of her throat; understands she needs a task to shift her focus. He couldn’t have saved her more if he’d thrown a line to stop her drowning. “Fenris,” she says thickly. The firepit pops, sparks into the night; the moon shines pale and placid overhead, unmoved.

“I know, Hawke.” He cups her cheek with his other hand, holds her gaze. “It will pass. It will. Trust me.”

She does, more than anyone she’s ever known. If he says it will pass, it will pass, and she will live one day without thinking of this man again. “Thank you,” she says, and kisses him. Her racing heart slows; her hands grow steady. She takes in one breath, then another, and lets them out in a tempered stream. She _can_ do this; she can find a place to start. “Thank you. Let’s find the keys and get them out of here.”

“I enjoy following you,” Fenris murmurs, smiling, and so he does, and so they do.

—

3.

The journey back into her own body is longer, fraught with pitfalls that catch her when she least expects.

They return to Kirkwall for the last time in the middle of Kingsway. The weather has turned cold by now, the trees scattered throughout the city streets at last going brown and gold, and scarves and hats begin to appear on passersby in early evening. For several weeks, she does little more than kiss Fenris on the lips: quick things, like punctuation in a sentence, to pepper in a little flavor where it’s needed. He never begins an embrace on his own—more than once she makes some stupid joke and he begins to reach for her, catches himself, and withdraws before he thinks she’ll notice. He waits for her to come to him every time.

It is good, at the start. It is a gentleness she needs.

And then, one day, weeks later, for no reason at all—it _hurts_. Not like a lever flipping, one state to the next; rather it is some rainstorm seeped into the earth, softening a tender place in her heart into a bruise she doesn’t even know exists until it’s struck. She waits, shocked at herself; it gets no better and in fact grows more painful with every passing day. He looks at her, sometimes, and his eyes are so sad…

 _I don’t want you to wait_ , she snaps, after the discussion goes poorly and they are both red-cheeked with anger. _I don’t want to spend an hour introspecting on my emotional fragility every time you want to kiss me. I don’t want you to flinch when you get close and then remember I got hurt. I want it to be like it was before._

_It will never be like it was before._

_It certainly won’t, with you refusing to trust me with my own self._

_Of course I trust you!_

_Of course you don’t, or we wouldn’t be arguing!_

It’s not fair to either of them, and she knows it when she says it, but what she can’t say instead is that at the root of it, despite certain similarities in their respective roads, they are not the same person. They’re _not_ , and what worked with Fenris cannot work with her.

He has always responded well to patience. To persistence, and tenacious kindness, and little distractions to pull him out of his more brooding moods. To terrible jokes like burrs in his gaiters, not because they truly annoy him but because he likes to have something to be snobbish about. To unexpected, tender displays of affection—not _too_ displayed, in case others might see and take it from him even now—and to the quiet recognition of his favorite foods, his tastes, his preferred colors. Like a cat, if she came at him too directly with her feelings, he might bolt in affront; better to sidle in without looking, hand outstretched, and wait for him to make the choice.

She knows his history with Danarius, she does. Of course it is what he needs, more than anything.

Hawke needs a solid shove in the middle of her back.

 _I need you to believe I’ll stop you_ , she says later, once the anger has dwindled and they have moved to the sofa, his head in her lap, a book propped on his knee. _I need you to treat me as if I’m not teetering on the edge of death. After a broken leg heals, there’s only so long you can limp for fear of it hurting. At some point, you have to walk straight again._

 _And a broken leg pushed too hard too soon may heal crooked, and then you limp for life._ His eyes flash, but at her challenging glare he sighs and closes the book.

She runs her fingers over his heavy black brows, smoothing out the tension there. Fenris had been tortured by the one he’d loved. He could not deny his master because there _was_ no denial, not really, not without the loss of everything that mattered in his world, everything that made up who he’d been. Not until he had refused the slave had he discovered the man in its place. Not until he had seen the absence of suffering had he been able to compass the scope of the horror he’d lived for so long.

Bortas is not Danarius. Bortas had been a sharp, quick violence in the length of her life, no love mixed in with the anguish. A snapped collarbone, perhaps. A dislocated elbow. An agony in every way, excruciating and terrible, but for her—something that can heal again. She cannot bear the thought that Fenris will cradle her like glass forever.

 _I won’t break_ , she whispers, leaning over him on the sofa. _Couldn’t if I tried. And I’ve tried, believe me._

 _Poor handling can cause cracks all the same_ , he says acerbically, but after a moment’s pause, he reaches an abrupt hand to the nape of her neck and pulls her down into a kiss. Short, and a bit awkward given the angle, but as precious as a little fleck of gold.

 _I do love you_ , she sighs when it is over, just in case he has forgotten.

 _I am yours,_ he says, and kisses her again. It is a little sad, a little tentative, but it’s real, and for now she supposes that’s all she can ask.

—

It gets better over time, it does. Fenris grows less and less hesitant when he reaches for her; Hawke grows markedly less waspish. One cold, sunny afternoon in her library, she pecks his lips and turns to go, only for him to pull her back to his mouth where they stand before the fire. He holds her lightly, and he will instantly release her should she resist, but she finds to her surprise she is all too willing to be pulled. She loops her arms around his neck; he grips her by the waist, slides a hand up to the middle of her back.

She hums against his lips. His answering chuckle is a touch unsure, more a puff of air over her cheek, but when she tilts her head and opens her mouth under his, pressing back into him with all she’s got, he sucks in a sharp breath through his nose and gives himself to her completely.

He always has. Even that first night so long ago had been a surrender, though she hadn’t recognized it for months; as stark naked as they’d both been his vulnerability had eclipsed her own. After all, _she_ hadn’t feared he would find her wholly repulsive once she’d shed the last of her clothes; she hadn’t dreaded that his long-desired touch might cause her skin to burn like fire instead. She hadn’t wondered if she might, perhaps, be too damaged a woman for him to care for after all…

“Come back,” Fenris whispers. His hands have tangled in her hair, cupped at the nape of her neck.

Her throat goes tight. “I’m here. I am. Don’t stop.”

He searches her eyes only a moment, then pulls her back to him. It is easier after that to focus only on his soft breaths, the curling tugs in her hair, the warm solid weight of him as she pushes even closer. He tastes as good as he always has, the lyrium a familiar hot-cold sting, and after several minutes her body begins to remember exactly _why_ she once enjoyed this so much. Her thighs shift together in pleasant friction; the fire beside them pops, breaks a log in a spray of sparks and a rush of heat.

She can’t help the smile. He feels it, smiles back, and there’s enough smugness in it that Hawke trails one hand lazily across his shoulders, down his spine so that he shudders, and gives his arse one very solid squeeze.

He breaks off, breathing hard, and rests his forehead against hers. His lips are flushed and swollen, the lyrium in his chin shimmering; the green of his eyes has gone hectic as he looks up at her through his lashes. “Hawke…”

“No?”

“Not no. Just—give me a moment.”

“I don’t think you want a moment,” she murmurs, and toys with the toggles of his collar instead. “I could be wrong, I suppose.”

“Hawke,” he groans again, and she has the top two latches undone before he finishes the word. “Let me…”

“Hm?”

“Let me kiss you.” And he does, gripping her jaw, one of his bare feet nudging between hers, a new urgency in every line that makes her stomach jolt. A little nervous, perhaps; but she _wants_ it more, wants the memory of this made new, wants— _him_ , wants him in every way she can get him—

“Mistress, did you want this here or in your—oh! _Oh_!”

Hawke doesn’t know who’s the most surprised of the three of them—or the most embarrassed. Orana’s eyes jerk to the ceiling, her cheeks blazing red within seconds. Fenris jolts away, immediately reaching for his undone collar; Hawke makes a vain attempt at smoothing her own hair, then gives up. No point in pretending they hadn’t been seconds from having each other right here on the library rug before the fire.

“Say that again, Orana?” she asks, and by the end of the sentence her voice has steadied. Even straightening her shirt can do nothing now for the shreds of her dignity.

“A delivery for you, Mistress,” Orana tells the library ceiling, and indeed Hawke realizes she’s holding a brown-wrapped package about the size of a breadbox. “Your—part of your new armor, I think. Where…where should I…?”

“My room is fine, thank you.” She rubs the back of her wrist over her forehead, then gives a helpless smile. “Sorry, Orana.”

Orana dares a smile of her own, her cheeks still pink. “Of course. I will—forgive me. I will knock next time.”

“That’s kind of you, but let’s not pretend the door wasn’t wide open either.”

Orana giggles, curtsies, and goes to take the package upstairs. A necessary purchase, as Hawke’s original armor is long lost to some Cytates merchant, and Fenris had insisted she be fitted for new pieces the moment she had been well enough to stand. He’s glowering at her now, though she knows it’s more from embarrassment than anything, and she links her arms unrepentantly back around his waist.

“Don’t be angry,” she tells him, and drops a kiss on his nose. “At least we know there’s an ember or two left we can coax out.”

“More than that,” he grumbles, then sighs. “No matter. It is for the best. This should not be rushed.”

“Let’s not lie to each other. I mean, yes, certain fantasies no longer hold quite so much appeal, maybe, but the rest? Trust me, I don’t mind rushing.”

His longsuffering look tells her he does, though there’s enough amusement left there to delight her. “Come. Let’s see how it fits.”

“If you insist,” she says, dragging out the word, but as they turn to go he wraps one arm around her waist so that they may walk more closely together. More than a comfort, that; a promise. He is right that they do not need to rush.

All the time in the world, she thinks, gladdened by the thought, and they go up the stairs together.

—

Over the next few weeks, the kisses grow longer, more heated. Sometimes Fenris is the one to call the halt at the end; other times it is Hawke, when she can sense one or both of them is very near the end of their control and they cannot or will not go further. Fenris is always unfailingly polite afterwards, excusing himself into another room before returning a few minutes later, significantly more kempt; it is not what she wants, but she doesn’t know how to ask, and the idea that he might decline is so embarrassing that she can’t make herself offer.

One morning, she finally musters the courage, mostly because she is half-asleep and too tired to be afraid. She’s woken first, a rarity, and enjoys for several minutes the rarer comfort of his heavy, sleep-even breathing at her back. Dawn creeps over the windowsill, insistently lighting her room a deep rose-gold. The room grows warm; Fenris stirs at last, stretches, yawns, and she feels his hips press into hers from behind, just for a moment, before he yawns again and begins to roll away.

She knows what will happen next. He will disappear into the next room, take care of himself, and return in silence to slip back beneath the covers before she even starts to wake. Not this time. Not this time…

“Wait,” she says, her voice rough with sleep, and turns to look over her shoulder. “Let me.”

“Hm?” he asks, still half-asleep himself, and not until she frees one hand from the tangle of covers and grips his thigh does he take her meaning. His eyelids flicker in surprise.

“Let me. Please.”

He lets out a breath, then at last gives a hesitant nod. Hawke drags herself upright, scrapes the sleep from her eyes, pushes back up against the headboard; after a few moments of arranging Fenris has settled between her legs, his back against her chest, her bent knees on either side of his hips. He rests one hand just above her knee; the other flexes restlessly on the covers.

Like a bird perched on the edge of some narrow roof, too freshly healed from a broken wing. Nervous, unsure the bone will hold—but the open sky calls like a shout, and she is sick to death of fear.

She tugs at his linen sleeping shirt, rucks up the red cambric until she can run her hands over his bare stomach, enjoying the flex and tense of muscle and the little trills of lyrium-light that stream after her touch. His shoulders shift as he presses back against her; she shoves her nightshirt’s sleeves up to her elbows and tucks her chin over his shoulder. She doesn’t speak. Neither does he.

She flattens her palms to his stomach. He drags in air through his teeth in anticipation, and when she slides both hands carefully under his waistband he lets it out in a long, slow, measured sigh. He’s half-hard already; she dances light touches down the sides of him, cups him from underneath, presses one palm low on his belly where the hair is fine, and by the time she at last tugs down the leggings enough to get him free he’s gone fully stiff and wanting.

His head drops back onto her shoulder, his eyes closed. He breathes hard through his open mouth; when she takes his cock in hand he breathes harder still, his chest hitching, his grip digging into her pale thigh. She knows what he likes best and does not waste time: long, firm strokes, a little twist at the end, her other hand dipping underneath to press up from below. The paired lyrium lines that trail up either side of his cock are lit white as day, pulsing with every pull, and she hums encouragement into his ear.

He pushes even harder back into her chest, and his hips begin to jerk in matched rhythm to her strokes. His thighs quiver with the strain, his pulse jumping wildly in his throat. She hasn’t felt so powerful since the day she watched him tear out Danarius’s heart.

The covers apparently no longer suit, and he reaches up blindly, finds her shoulder behind him, and clenches into the fabric there. They’re both sweating, even through the cool fall morning; his gasps grow louder and more ragged with every minute. Her own need simmers distantly, easily ignored. At the moment she is far more interested in his pleasure.

“Come on,” she whispers at last, and nips at his ear. “Come on, Fenris.”

He gives a full-body shudder, his head digging hard into her shoulder as he thrusts into her hand. She nips his ear again, a little harder, and then sucks gently on the place where she bit, and he goes rigid in her arms. She grips him as he comes, smooths her free hand over his chest, murmurs nonsense encouragement into his ear. His hips work into her palm a little longer in short, unsteady bursts, and then all at once he lets out an explosive sigh and relaxes back against her, boneless in relief.

She strokes against him a few more times, light and soothing, then smooths over his stomach, the trembling muscles of his legs, his chest.

“I love you,” she tells him quietly, and his eyes fall shut as he heaves for breath. “I love you so much, Fenris.”

The clench on her shoulder eases; he fumbles for her hand and grips it tightly. She intertwines their fingers, presses a rough kiss to his knuckles, and he hides his face in her neck. “Hawke,” he says, and his voice shakes.

 _I know_ , she wants to say, but her own throat has closed traitorously tight. _I know, I know…_

Eventually, when the room has grown a little brighter and Fenris no longer breathes so fast, he turns to kiss down her jaw, the side of her throat, the junction of her shoulder. “Let me,” he starts roughly, and presses a hot, open-mouthed kiss to her collarbone.

So tempting. _So_ tempting, but— “No,” she whispers, unwilling to break the spell of the room, and runs her fingers through his hair before he can draw back. “I want to myself. But I want you here.” She swallows, can’t meet his eyes. “Is that all right?”

He leans away just enough to pull his sweat-stained sleeping shirt over his head, then returns to lie beside her so that she has room. Some maneuvering of the pillows and she is mostly flat on her back, her head resting on Fenris’s elbow; he tucks a bit of loose hair behind her ear and asks, “May I touch you?”

“ _Please_.”

He laughs, and with his assistance and some truly undignified wriggling, she sheds her smallclothes and yanks her nightshirt up to her hips. They’ve done this before, of course. Hawke has always enjoyed an audience—the more riveted the better—and Fenris has always been more than happy to indulge her more prurient desires. Not just for his own pleasure, though that is part of it, but because he likes to watch how she touches herself so that he can tease her with the knowledge the next time. A mutually beneficial relationship.

Still, there is something new in the way his hand ghosts over hers as she reaches between her legs, in how his fingertips skim down the rise of her ribs and across the plane of her stomach. She bends one knee and shifts her hips for a better angle; he tucks his arm under her thigh and helps before feathering again over the back of her arm.

The more terrible of her scars are gone. Her wrists are long since healed, her throat smooth and unburned once more, her broken cheekbone made whole. They are left only where the wounds were worst: faint silver bands around her ankles, a handful of ridges that ladder up and down her back where the deepest lash-marks ran. Fenris’s thumbs skip over them sometimes when he holds her, faint lines where she can’t quite feel him as well as the rest, but aside from that, very few marks of her slavery remain. She likes that Fenris no longer must linger on the bruises.

It doesn’t take much to work herself up. She’s still hot from before, even with the little rest between, and when Fenris— _touches_ her, even with such care, the lyrium in his fingertips tingles wonderfully through her skin. He knows it, too; when she huffs at one abrupt departure he gives a small, self-satisfied smile and deliberately lights the lyrium on each finger before stroking up to her breast.

 _Oh_ , she likes that. Likes it more with he licks his fingers and returns, giving special attention to her nipples, and at the same time drops little bites up and down her throat. She doesn’t particularly try to prolong her finish—that game is for another time—and within a few minutes she throws her head back over Fenris’s bicep and clenches her teeth. His hand drops to cover hers between her legs, the lyrium ablaze, pressing in as hard as she does herself; she lets herself surrender, lets him take care of her for this last part, and rides the pleasure as long as she can before it ebbs.

He strokes her through the aftershocks, his lips pressed to her temple. When she can open her eyes again he’s watching her, warm and without fear. She nods; he licks his fingers clean and she kisses him after, until even that taste is gone and he draws back, sober and smiling, to tuck the bit of hair behind her ear again.

“Well,” she says, only a little hoarse. “That’s a relief.”

Not just the obvious, of course, though that is good enough. Better that they know now she can still find desire in his touch.

“Indeed,” he murmurs. “A start, perhaps. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“If we weren’t already late, I’d have you take me up against the headboard right this minute.”

“…The trip could wait. The Coast will be cold today.”

Hawke laughs, loud and joyful. “You _would_ complain about this weather. In Ferelden this would be a beautiful balmy morning.”

“Good that we are in Kirkwall, then.”

“And the slavers live to slave another day?”

Fenris hesitates, clearly torn. Hawke laughs again; he smiles, shakes his head, kisses her once more before pushing to his feet. “So be it. Come. Get up. Let us deal with these slavers and come home again.”

How easily he says it. A painful lump rises in her throat; she has to swallow more than once to clear it, but at last she manages, “All right, all right. Get me out of these covers, then. We’ve wrecked the sheets.”

She wobbles a bit when he pulls her to her feet, but he’s as steady as ever, and once she has her legs under her again she cups his face. This beloved nose with its proud bridge; these dear, full lips, still a little bruised. She says, “This can’t have been easy for you. I wish I could thank you in the way you deserve.”

“ _No_ ,” he says, the green in his eyes burning. He covers her hands with his own. “Let me stay with you. Hawke, let me be here when you need me. I need no thanks aside from that.”

Flames. “ _Flames_ ,” she says belatedly, and wonders if he can see in her face how much she loves him. “Keep talking like that and you’ll make a girl cry.”

One corner of his mouth lifts, strangely sweet. “Let us go kill slavers instead, then.”

“Let’s.”

They dress quickly, and Fenris helps her with the fasteners for the new armor she has not yet learned. She leaves a note for Orana that she’ll take care of the sheets herself when they get back, though she doubts the girl will listen, and when they emerge at last into the day, armed and armored, there is a new lightness in her heart she has not felt since before they ambushed her in the stone cliffs above the city. A brilliant sky thrown open, endless before her.

How odd, that she’d forgotten for so long how to hope.

—

Of course, not all their attempts at intimacy go so smoothly. The first time she tries to suck him off, she makes some movement without thinking, not because Fenris asks but because Bortas had once enjoyed it, and anything that would finish him quicker would get her out of his tent and back to the slave line that much faster. Fenris senses her abrupt horror, pulls free, and before he can say a word she bursts into shocked tears.

It's maddening for so many reasons. Not just because the shadow of Bortas still haunts her, though that infuriates her even now; but because thanks to his history Fenris had seen this as an unpleasant service for so long, a memory of one-sided pleasure only, and it had taken her months to persuade him she had profoundly enjoyed the giving of it on her side as well. Now even that is tainted, all her hard work undone, and weeks pass before either of them is willing to try again.

So. They find other ways to take and give their pleasure. One night Fenris hooks both her knees over his shoulder and comes between her thighs pressed tightly together; another evening he settles himself between her legs and brings her off over and over with his mouth, his hands, as many times as she asks, until she is sweating and sprawled shamelessly among the sheets. He even lets her snarl her fingers in his hair, something he normally dislikes, and she cherishes that as the gift it is even as she comes, shouting at the ceiling and desperately trying to keep hold of her magic.

Other nights they do not touch at all, when his shades or hers rise unrelenting before them, when she wants to tear off her skin rather than be touched for even an instant. When he tries to stretch his legs and, wincing, tells her the lyrium will be bad today. When she cannot shake the sense that Bortas himself stands just outside the house, waiting for some slight misstep to snatch her away once more—

 _He is dead_ , Fenris tells her, over and over, in the quiet hours of the night when the dreams come most strongly. _He is dead. I swear it. I saw him die._

 _Yours, too,_ she whispers on other nights, when it is his turn to wake sweaty and wild-eyed in the dark. _He will never return. Never, never. He is dead, too._

One evening she comes and sits in his lap in the library, kisses him quietly, and tells him she is ready to try. He tells her he is ready too, so long as she swears she will stop him if she needs. After everything, it is an easy promise to make.

And in the end they do not need it. Fenris has insisted all this time that they do not rush, and so they have not; and in the long slow road they have traveled to reach this point they have found their breaking points together, new and old, found the ways they will and will not take their desires from each other, and this is only one more little step along that path. No cliff’s edge, where she might fear the fall; no great leap into empty space. Her arms around his neck rather than tangled in white hair, his cock instead of his fingers and his tongue—in fact, the greatest difference she can perceive is that with his face so close she can kiss him much more easily, and when he moans at her touch she can hear him without straining.

There is no pain, not even once. He takes so long to prepare her that she complains, hot and ready, at his delay, and when he slowly—slowly—pushes in, she succumbs to her own impatience and pulls him by his hips the rest of the way to her. Four months since the last time—five—six? She can’t remember. It hardly matters. It is all as new as the first, from before she’d realized what it might mean to really love Fenris, and even if there are some demons they will never exorcise it will _never_ matter in the face of this moment.

They take their time. They find a rhythm and keep it, hands tracing over each other’s faces, each other’s bodies, mostly gentle, occasionally not as one or the other wishes, and coax each other unselfishly to a smooth, rolling peak. Hawke comes first, after an age, Fenris’s teeth on her throat and one hand on her breast; he holds her through it, murmuring in her ear until she can blink away the stars, and when she can move again she hooks her ankles together around his waist and leans back into the pillows, every inch of her lax and well sated, until he can find his own pleasure in her in turn.

How rare a thing. How precious a gift, to share in this with a lover; to be seen without disguise and be so well loved all the same.

He finishes silently, his face buried in her shoulder and every line of lyrium in his skin striped bright as day. She strokes lazily down his cheek, the back of his neck, across the straining lines of his shoulders until they begin to ease, and the lyrium goes dim and dies away, and he nearly collapses atop her when the tension in his trembling elbows gives out at last.

All her air sighs out in a whoosh. “Heavy,” she gets out in a startled wheeze. “Fenris, you’re _heavy_.”

Fenris laughs. Laughs again outright, and that makes _her_ laugh, and even as he shifts just enough to one side that she can breathe she can’t stop herself from wrapping both arms around him and pulling him tight as she can get. _Stay,_ she tells him, throwing one leg over his, delighting as he smiles at her from the pillow of his folded arm. _A little longer. Stay with me_.

 _I am yours_ , he says, proud and sure, and kisses her again and again until there is nothing left in the world but this little space they have carved out around them.

—

4.

“There,” says Isabela, entirely self-satisfied and so low Varric can barely hear her, even though she sits directly beside him. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Varric follows her eyes to the door where Fenris and Hawke have just entered in a bluster of late fall winds and dead leaves. It is a crowded night in The Hanged Man, and more than one patron protests the unwelcome chilly gust; Hawke only laughs, saunters over, slings her arms over their shoulders and winks until their complaints give way to laughter, cheer, and good-humored ribbing in the way only Hawke can do. Fenris stands with a benevolent smile at her back, folding the cloak she’s shed haphazardly into his arms; when she turns back he shakes his head, still smiling, and she tucks her arm through his before they make their way through the tipsy crowd to Varric’s table.

“You did,” Varric says, and leans back in his chair. “Believed you the whole time.”

Isabela’s mouth curves up, but she doesn’t call him a liar to his face.

That woman hadn’t been Hawke, the day she and Fenris had finally arrived to meet them at the small wreck of an inn outside the Sybaris town square. She’d been—even he, career wordsmith, couldn’t have found the words if he wanted. Hunched into herself, flat, frightened, eyes darting from side to side as if anticipating a blow at every turn. Her skin, always pale, had been sallow with fear and illness, throwing into stark relief the deep green bruises at her throat, her wrists, her cheek. She’d hardly been able to walk.

Fenris had just helped her from the horse when they’d come out to greet her. Her knees had almost given way, and he’d had to catch her under the arms to keep her up. Once steady, Hawke had turned to the rest of them with a pantomime of a smile; Fenris had straightened behind her, and the awfulness of his expression had turned Varric’s heart to cold stone.

He would give a great deal to never see that look on Fenris’s face again. A terrible black rage, barely banked behind exhaustion, and a grief so raw it stung to see. His hands had trembled as he’d let go of Hawke, and he’d crossed his arms tight across his chest to hide it from Isabela and Anders, who’d gone immediately to Hawke’s side in his place. Varric had held Fenris’s eyes instead across the courtyard, had understood in the silence that passed between them what it meant. They had both had known it to be too late. Too late for so many things…

Varric had found Isabela much later that night, after Anders had exhausted himself with his healing and Fenris had taken Hawke up to their room to rest. She’d had a mostly-empty bottle of Antivan whiskey in front of her at the worn wooden table; when he’d dropped into the chair across she’d passed it to him without a word. He rarely drank to excess, and even more rarely to forget, but that night he’d finished her bottle and bought another, and another after that. She had said nothing, only taken it when he passed it, and drunk, and passed it back again.

Late, so late it had been early, Isabela had leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. _It’ll be a bit,_ she’d said, her fingers linking behind her head, _but we’ll see her happy again._

He’d said nothing. She’d cut a glance at him, a glimpse of copper shining in the shadows. _Don’t you think?_

 _Sure,_ he’d said, and thrown back the rest of the glass. _Sure, Rivaini._

But here Hawke is, back in the bar where she belongs, Fenris with her where _he_ belongs, solicitously pulling out a chair for her at Varric’s left. He folds both her cloak and his over the back of his own chair, then sits beside her, and Hawke smiles at him so brilliantly it takes Varric’s breath away.

“Look at you, handsome,” she teases, light as she’s ever been. “So polite in mixed company.”

“I am as I always am,” Fenris says. One eyebrow lifts in mock pique. “Perhaps it’s only your unfamiliarity with table manners that so surprises you.”

“ _Me?_ ” Hawke says, pretends to gasp, and chokes in a very real way on the tumbler of whiskey Isabela’s just slid in front of her. All pretense vanishes as Fenris leans towards her in open concern, but she waves him back and coughs once or twice to clear her throat. “Maker, I’ve been swallowing most of my life. You’d think I could do it well enough by now.”

Isabela laughs. Even Fenris smirks, and Varric chuckles, unable to help himself. “The others are on their way,” he tells her. “Keep that up and you’ll have them worried all over again.”

“Ah,” Hawke says softly, and smiles. “We can’t have that, can we?”

Varric inclines his head. Fenris’s arm makes some slight movement; Varric knows beneath the table he has taken Hawke’s hand in his own. Good. _Good_ , for them both, after everything.

Isabela’s cut her eyes at Varric again, that same copper gleam above an impenetrable smile. “No,” she says, and looks at last to Hawke. “I think not.”

The door to the Hanged Man opens again, and Aveline stamps her way in, rubbing her arms briskly against the late fall chill. “Brrr,” she announces, loud enough for them to hear from their table, and Varric waves her over. “Bracing tonight, isn’t it?” she adds as she emerges from the crowd, dropping one hand briefly to the top of Hawke’s head.

“Warmer now that you’re here,” Hawke says, and winks. “Missed you last week.”

“Donnic’s over his cold, so I’ll be out with you next time.” She sinks down beside Isabela with a heavy sigh. “He’s offering to make flatbread tomorrow, if you’re interested.”

“Oh, _always_ ,” Hawke exclaims with genuine delight; Fenris’s arm comes to rest along the back of her chair in easy, open comfort.

Varric leans back in his own chair, steepling his fingers in front of him. The conversation continues, turns to sillier things, inconsequential nonsense and harmless gossip over what some noblewoman said to some guardsman just the other day. Hawke throws back her head and laughs again and again, unbruised, unafraid; her eyes light with joy as Aveline makes some joke at Fenris’s expense and Fenris responds with acidic sarcasm. Her hands dance as she talks, trace the rim of her half-gone glass, alight for a moment on Fenris’s wrist before fluttering away again.

 _We’ll see her happy again_.

Isabela pulls a deck of cards from her corset, fans out a dextrous handful and flutters them in front of her face. “Well? Shall we play a round while we wait for the rest?”

“Yes,” Hawke says, and plucks one from Isabela’s fingers before flipping it over. “Angel of Death,” she says, and tips her head to Fenris. “There you go. The game’s ended for everyone. For some more than others.”

Isabela laughs and steals the card back, shuffling it into the deck. “Save some for the rest of us, sweet thing.”

“Always.”

Aveline deals. Isabela cheats, and Varric lets her; Hawke bets badly and groans as Fenris takes her markers hand after hand, failing to suppress his own amusement. Sebastian arrives, stomping the chill from his legs; Merrill and Anders tumble in with scarves flapping and hands clapped to their hats against the wind. They all settle into their places around the table, effortless as always; Norah brings them one round of drinks and then another, and a board of cheese and meat and grapes, and very nearly drops her dour frown on two separate occasions when Hawke thanks her very prettily for her service.

Yes, Varric thinks, as Isabela crows over another won hand, as Aveline pretends to offense and rolls her eyes. Like this, circles upon circles, endings that lead to new beginnings, rough and round and perfect. These little moments, such fine things, such scarred and precious things. Yes—just this. For as long as they can keep it.

“Come on, then,” Hawke says, turning bright blue eyes to Varric’s seat at the head of the table. He’s lost the thread of the conversation; now he realizes they _all_ look towards him expectantly, dark faces and light, the table filled every seat with a ready gladness he has not seen in—so long. He doesn’t know what story they want, but it doesn’t matter. There’s a thousand tales he can tell them here with an ending worth the telling.

“Well,” Varric says, folding his hands in front of him, leaning forward just so until he can rest his mouth against his thumbs thoughtfully. Hawke grins at him, bare and brilliant; Fenris rests his hand, expectant, content, at the small of her back. “No shit,” he says at last, and smiles. “There Hawke was…”

—

end.


End file.
